Wonder at the Edge of the World

by Nicole Helget

  “Back here,” he says. He darts about, unlatching doors. “These cages will be ovens if I don’t open them up.”

  I go around the side of the house with Eustace, who carries Fob like a baby.

  Along with the crackling and rumbling of the fire, the houses themselves seem to be groaning and whining. The wind is wicked. Great wafts of heat sometimes blow so hard that I have to stop walking and fight to remain upright.

  “We’d better hurry and get out of here!” I say. “This whole lane’s going to burn.”

  “I know,” says Eustace. “But Ma won’t move! She’s scared and stubborn.”

  In the back of the house, most of the animal crates and gates have been opened. A couple of billy goats are chewing on some shirts they’ve pulled from the clothesline.

  “What am I gonna do?” moans Ruby. She’s crying. She’s got her apron up to her mouth and is weeping into it. “Those are the Millers’ shirts. All smoky and now eaten by goats.”

  Tolerone’s burning, and she’s worried about shirts? She’s not making sense. “Ruby,” I say. “It’s me, Lu. Let’s go to my house where it’s safe, OK?”

  “Oh, Lordy,” she says. “Is your mother and sister safe?” Then she starts howling again. “Who would do such a thing?”

  Eustace opens the last of the cages and kennels. A couple of pheasants take flight, and a turkey waddles out. I touch Ruby on the elbow and then grab a firm hold and try to lift. She’s a heavy woman, and her joints pain her. Eustace puts Fob under his one arm, like a sack of potatoes, and he goes to Ruby’s other side and lifts her arm. Together, we get Ruby to her feet.

  “Come on now, Ma,” says Eustace. “Let’s go where it’s safe.”

  Ruby makes some protestations about how we should leave her and only worry about ourselves. We ignore her and lead her to the front of the house.

  “Just a minute,” I say, and neither Ruby nor Eustace objects. I go and grab the crate. Though it’s slow and dangerous, we walk all the way out of town. Eustace and I don’t talk at all. He’s got his jaw set firmly. Ruby moans and cries nearly the whole time.

  “Don’t you think we ought to check on the Millers?” she asks. Eustace and I look at each other, but we keep walking. The end of town where the Millers live is completely engulfed. My eyes hurt with biting smoke, and I keep moving forward, toward my house. Eustace comes along, too, and ignores Ruby’s worry.

  And then the Medicine Head screeches like an eagle.

  CHAPTER 11

  Out of the flames and smoke and chaos, a hand grabs my arm firmly. I yank it away and brace the Medicine Head’s crate against my side.

  “Don’t do that!” I yell at whoever grabbed me.

  I look up and find a tall man standing before me. My eyes glide from his chest to his face. His blue eyes study me.

  I know those eyes.

  I hold my breath and hear my heart pounding in my chest. Instinctively, I clutch the crate even tighter to me until it presses into my hip bone. I back away from the man. My skirt hem blows around my ankles from the winds of the fire.

  “Girl!” the man with blue eyes yells. “A smart child would get out of this town.” His voice is crisp somehow, even above the howling of the fires.

  I’m speechless, as though my voice wouldn’t work even if I had the right words to say. Those eyes know me. For years, I have been imagining the revengeful words and deeds I would heap upon this man, but in this second, I am caught totally unprepared and I am scared inside and out. All I do is stare and hold tight to Father’s possession.

  More loudly than before, undeniably, the Medicine Head is saying Hold me. Hold me. The man tilts his head and turns his ear toward me, or toward the Medicine Head. He shakes his head, like he’s trying to rid himself of some idea.

  “Girl!” he yells at me. “Are you stupid? Get out of town!” He bends to my face and gazes deep into my eyes.

  I see a flash of recognition. He grabs my arm again, but this time it’s the one that’s holding the Medicine Head. I turn as though I’m going to do as he says and get out of town.

  He pulls me closer. “Wait,” he says. He looks me over again. “I wonder if we haven’t met before.” He’s staring at the crate now, turning his ear to it as though he can hear it.

  The ends of his mustache are coiled and singed. His face is blackened with soot, but this is without a doubt the last rider of the posse that hanged my father. And what I knew then, what I’ve known all along, comes to me surely: This is the man responsible for my father’s death. I feel sick in my stomach. My mouth tastes like iron and is full of saliva.

  “I,” he booms, “am Captain Cornelius Greeney.” He lowers his head closer to the Medicine Head’s crate. He’s listening, and he smiles as though he has just read my mind. He lifts his quirt and uses it to point at the box. “Do you hear something?” he asks.

  Just then a rider on a horse shouts out, “Captain! We need your counsel on the north end of town. The insurgents are regrouping, sir.” The horse rears and kicks up dust and whinnies.

  Captain Greeney faces the rider and says, “Get me a fresh horse.”

  Even if he didn’t see me that day hiding in the grass, which I think he did, I worry that I look every bit the image of Father. I can’t think of what to do or say. I hold my breath and I try to swallow all of the saliva in my mouth. But when I do, my stomach lurches it back up. With the smoke, the heat, the fires, the worry, the whole world seems hazy. I can’t see. My ears ring. The ground beneath my feet is unsteady.

  “Girl,” Captain Greeney demands, “what is in that box?”

  Eustace comes forward. I put my arm up in front of his chest, to stop him. But he gently puts it back down.

  “Sir,” Eustace says, “you might want to step away. That’s my pet rattlesnake she’s got in there. Keeping it safe for me, she is.”

  Captain Greeney backs away from me. Eustace is clever and quick. I’m grateful for him right now.

  “I hate snakes,” Captain Greeney hisses. He leans back and slits his eyes. “You look very familiar to me.” He tilts his head as though a slightly different angle will determine whether he recognizes me or not. “I think,” he sneers at me, “we’ve met before, but I just can’t place you.” He smiles a strange smile. His eyeteeth are longer than most people’s. They make him seem serpentine.

  Captain Greeney jerks his quirt against his leg. “Your eyes remind me of…” He touches his mustache and grimaces.

  The fires reflect in his eyes. I can’t look away. I’m mute. How long will this go on? Could I die of fear? Could I hold my own breath to death? Is that possible? My mouth is full of a bitter bile. I have to spit. But I can’t. I shouldn’t.

  He goes on. “Yes, yes.” He tilts his head one way and then the other. “The long nose. The eyes that seem squinty from peering at small things.” He leans in so close to my face that I can smell his breath. He reaches out again and moves a strand of hair away from my forehead. His fingernails are long and scratch against my skin.

  The rider from before gallops up again, this time holding the reins of another horse. “Captain!” he shouts. “Your horse is ready, sir.”

  Captain Greeney’s evil eyes glare at me and then at the crate.

  “Ahem,” interrupts the rider. “Sir! The fire!”

  Captain Greeney ignores him. “Kill that thing. I don’t like snakes.” He strokes his mustache. “You will be seeing me again, girl. Count on it.”

  My stomach churns in revulsion. I have to get the disgusting taste out. I can’t keep it in for one more second. I lean over and spit right on the toe of Captain Greeney’s boot. My spittle slides from the top of his foot to the parched ground, leaving a wet and shiny streak.

  He looks at his boot. He makes a sound like “Wha!” He shakes his boot as though he’s trying to shake the slaver off. “You little…” he begins to say.

  “Captain!” shouts the rider. “We need your orders, sir!”

  Captain Greeney raises his hand to the
rider. Then he straightens his coat, turns, and mounts his horse, even as flames shoot all around us. He looks like the king of Hell. “Oh, duty, duty! You call for me again and again!” He takes off his hat and waves it in the air. “Let it burn!” he shouts. “Let the whole town burn!” Then he whips his horse and shouts, “Yah!” and rides toward the north end.

  The rider gives me a sympathetic look, soft and kind. “I don’t know who you are, young lady, but you’d best get yourself out of Tolerone.” Then he rides away.

  The Medicine Head is screeching now, like a hawk over a Kansas sky. I drop it. I press my palms against my ears. The swirling flames and curling smoke and dizzying smells overwhelm me. “Stop!” I shout. “Quiet!” I pinch my eyes closed. I wish the whole world would go away.

  CHAPTER 12

  I open my stinging eyes. Ruby fans me with her apron. She’s talking to me, too. “Hallelujah Wonder. Who was that man? That’s a bad man, I think.”

  “Come on, Lu,” Eustace says. “I’ll help you.” He hands me his hankie. “Here. Take deep breaths into this.”

  I take it and cover my mouth. I inhale a few times. Even with the hankie, the air is thick with smoke. But I begin to feel a bit better. I look around for my crate, but I can’t see it on the ground. “Where is it?” I ask Eustace.

  Ruby bends over and leans into my face. “I got it,” she says, and points at the ground near her feet. “It’s right here. I got it safe for you, but I didn’t want to hold a snake crate.” Then she looks from me to Eustace, like she’s suddenly realizing something. “But it isn’t a snake in there, is it?”

  I look at her; then I look at Eustace, who shakes his head at me, which tells me not to tell his ma. I grab the crate.

  From Tolerone to my house is only two miles, but with Ruby and me, and with Fob acting like a baby again, we move very slowly. The Medicine Head is thrumming a mellow call to me. I feel like I am constantly adjusting the crate under my arm.

  Ruby stops and looks back at the town every few feet. People scream. Horses whinny. We hear crying and anguish. We also hear shouts of good people trying to help other people, things like “Here! Get in my wagon.” And “I’ve found her!” But in between those kindnesses are mostly crashing and rumbling and black smoke, gray ash, and red embers. I never liked much about Tolerone, but I sure feel sad about that now. When Ruby stops, I stop, too. I look back and nearly want to run and maybe help somebody—even the Millers. Maybe help anyone. Eustace tugs at us.

  “Don’t ever run at a fire,” he says, as if reading my mind.

  “You did,” I say quietly.

  Ruby whacks Eustace on the back of the head.

  “Ouch!” Eustace says. He rubs his skull furiously. “What was that for?”

  “For running into a fire!” Ruby says. She tucks stray hair back up into the cloth she always wears wrapped around her head. Ruby’s hair is nearly all gray and white. I’m struck again by how old she is. “I’d have gotten myself out,” she insists. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  “All right, Ma,” says Eustace. He rubs his head again. Fob barks as though in agreement.

  My lungs hurt. My feet are burned. We’re all of us, head to toe, ashes. I should be exhausted, but the events of the night and the mere fact that I survived them, the Medicine Head, the fire, Captain Greeney, make me feel full up with verve. I look up into the sky and try to breathe deeply.

  “Oh,” moans Ruby. “I am tired.” She keeps moving, though, one foot in front of the other. She looks back at Tolerone and shakes her head. “All those poor souls,” she says. “I hope they don’t suffer.”

  I recall a story Father told me about a fire. Once, when he worked on a whaling ship, he survived a fire that burned up the whole thing in the middle of the ocean. The whalers were boiling whale blubber in cauldrons inside an enormous brick oven. The flames didn’t stay in the oven, though.

  One of the sailors was tarring the deck too close to the oven, and he and the bucket burst into flames. So did the deck, the side of the ship, then the sails, then the rigging, and eventually the whole ship. My father and the rest of the crew, including the burned sailor, were able to escape by lowering the small whaleboats into the ocean.

  Father said the burned man suffered awfully for the three days it took for a ship to come find them. The top half of his body was totally burned. His hair was gone and his scalp was burned down to white membrane with red spots all over. His ears had melted completely off. One of his eyes was fine, but the other eyelid sagged over the eyeball. Father said his eyelid looked like a clump of wax on a candle. Father was good at describing things, especially awful things, so that you could really see them in your mind. Father said the man’s burned hands had no skin and had curled into claws. Whenever anything touched him, he screamed in agony.

  The burned man from my father’s story was in such pain that he begged someone to shoot him, and they would have done it if they’d had a gun, but no one did. So they tried to keep him as comfortable as possible and gave him every last drop of rum they had. He lived long enough to be lifted onto the rescue ship; then he finally died after a few more days. His last words were “Oh, good.”

  “I hope they don’t suffer, too,” I say to Ruby about the people of Tolerone, though I know better.

  “Come on, Ma,” says Eustace. “You’re doing fine.”

  Good old Eustace keeps us all going. And the farther we get away from the fire, the quieter the Medicine Head gets.

  I hold on to Ruby’s arm. It’s bare. Her blouse’s been burned or torn. I’ve never seen her arm before, and now I can see why. White scars run up and down the entire length of it. They look like wrinkled worms.

  “What are these?” I ask. “All these marks?”

  Ruby shuffles along and breathes heavily. I suppose her lungs hurt, too. “Miss Wonder, you don’t want to know about that.”

  Eustace looks straight ahead and picks up the pace.

  “Yes, I do,” I say. “What did you do?”

  “She didn’t do those to herself,” Eustace says. He shakes his head like I’m a big dummy. I’m too tired to get mad at him. “Tell her, Ma,” he says.

  “I was younger than you,” Ruby says. “It was a long time ago. I don’t like to think about those days.”

  “Did someone hit you?” I ask.

  “Oh, yes,” Ruby says. “Someone hit me all the time. And tied me up and hit me some more.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “For what?” she repeats. “For nothing. That’s what. I was just a child. If I looked at a body wrong, I got tied up and hit with a spoon or a lash or a fire iron. My missus was a madwoman.”

  “Why didn’t your mother stop her?” I ask.

  “My mother?” she says. “I never saw my mother but a half dozen times. She died or got sold.” Ruby shrugs. “Truth is, I don’t even know what happened to her. I was too young, and then it wasn’t proper to ask. I got raised by an elderly house slave. She was a good woman, but she couldn’t protect me from the white missus.”

  Ruby has the kind of face that makes it easy to imagine her as a little girl. Some people do, in case you haven’t noticed it before. The image of a mean lady whipping poor little Ruby stiffens my back and arms, as though I’m bracing to receive those blows myself.

  In the past, when I listened to Eustace go on about slavery, I would chuck away his talk sometimes. I guess I thought his life appeared sufferable. No one smacked him or whipped him or chained him. In a lot of ways, he seemed just like me—young and at the mercy of adults’ choices. But after listening to Ruby, I’m realizing Eustace’s life is a lot more troublesome than I thought. “Why would anyone do that to a little girl?” I ask.

  “Well, the whole territory is asking that very question,” says Ruby. “You’re a smart girl, Hallelujah Wonder, but you got to look up once in a while. You keep studying the small things, rocks and seeds, but you also got to study what’s happening all around you.” She stops and turns back toward
Tolerone. “Don’t let that town burn down for nothing,” she says. “Probably not much going to change while I’m alive, but you kids got a chance to improve. You can change all of this.” She waves toward the black sky.

  I can’t remember the last time I had so little to say. I can’t remember the last time I was interested in anything an adult had to say.

  “You understand?” Ruby asks.

  I nod.

  I don’t like it that some people, like Ruby’s missus and Captain Greeney, seem to be protected by the law or by title. I don’t like how the world can be completely upside down. Captain Greeney’s the one who should have been punished. Not my father. Ruby’s missus is the one who should have been punished. Not sweet Ruby.

  The fire winds lap at my hair and lift strands of it. By morning, everyone in the territory will know what happened here tonight.

  “You all right, Miss Hallelujah?” Ruby asks.

  “I think so,” I say. I touch Ruby’s scars and stroke them softly. She doesn’t mind. “Ruby?” I gulp. “Does that mean you won’t be sad if the Millers… are dead? Because then you won’t be owned anymore?”

  Ruby pats my arm. We keep walking. After a while she says, “Of course I’ll be sad. I don’t want anyone to suffer. I’ve had my share of miserable owners, but the Millers weren’t evil. Did you know Mrs. Miller nursed me through pneumonia a couple years back? Saved my life with her nursing. That was a good deed. But the owning of another human being was a bad deed, a real bad deed. And she ought to have recognized it and set it right! It takes folks a long time to change their minds and their ways sometimes. Good people do bad things all the time.” She shuffles along. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry at them. I am. And I deserve to be!”

  “Do you think bad people sometimes do good deeds?” I ask.