“You girls be good,” their mother said. “If you go back in the house, I want you to walk around to the back door so you don’t distract nobody. This is just like church, remember?”
“We know,” Penny said.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Shannon said, leaning against the porch. She squeezed Misty’s knee and winked at her. “You mind if we stand together? Safety in numbers and all that?”
Misty’s mother smiled and joined Shannon on the grass. They walked across the driveway and merged with the back of the crowd. They were about the same size and shape, though Shannon was a little shorter, a little thinner. They talked with their heads bent close and their arms crossed over their chests. They’d lived within feet of each other for the last three years, but Misty had never seen them so close for so long. There was something about Shannon that made their mother afraid. What scared her, Misty wasn’t sure, but she knew what fear looked like, and she saw it in the slant of her mother’s shoulders and the tightness of her eyes on the rare occasion when Shannon came over.
Maybe she was afraid that if someone saw them standing side by side for too long that they would notice how similar they were. Misty’s mother may have worn longer skirts and scrubbed the kitchen harder and never cussed in front of company, but she could be loud and stubborn and brittle, too, just like William’s mother. The only difference was that Shannon didn’t hide it from anyone. She didn’t even try, maybe because she had too many other things to worry about, like keeping her truck running and food on the table. She was doing it all alone so she didn’t have time to conceal herself as neatly as Misty’s mother did, but the more Misty looked, the more she saw their sameness. They could have been friends, once.
The crowd grew as dark settled over the bottom. There was a comfort in the hushed murmur of all those familiar people and the faint crunching of shoes over gravel. Misty drew a blanket over her arms and closed her eyes. It was hard to tell which parts of her hurt, if it was her eye or the eyelid, the skin or the bone that ached, but the pain diffused throughout her body, settling into her like a familiar ghost as she listened to the crowd.
It seemed like all the worst things she feared were far away from her there. William wouldn’t hurt her now, not with so many people near. And the statues looked almost pretty in the dying light of evening, softened and melting into shadow. The garden was still silent, refusing any attempt that Misty had made to speak to it or the crawdads that afternoon. It was easy to imagine that the garden had never spoken to her at all. She’d only caught the edge of some other whispering, sneaking thing that fluttered too close and there was no danger, not to her or her family, not that night.
Misty didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until the garden knocked against the back of her mind, but this time the knock was loud, like a fist pounding inside her skull. Misty answered just to make the feeling stop.
“They’re clapping for him,” the garden said. “Why are they clapping for him?”
Misty looked at the garden. Earl stood in front of the fence with his arms spread out. The statues rose behind him and the crowd was clapping. Earl smiled.
“I don’t know,” Misty said.
“I thought they would notice.”
“Notice what?”
“The statues,” the garden said. “I thought they could see what he did to her.” Images of Caroline fluttered through Misty’s mind. “But they don’t. They don’t even care.”
“What happened to her?” Misty sat up on the porch. Penny was slumped beside her, one bare leg poking free from her blanket, one foot dangling off the edge of the porch. It was full night, and the crowd had nearly doubled in size since Misty closed her eyes. People filled not only the yard all the way to the creek, but they stood along the road, too. They craned their heads and smiled as Earl continued to speak, turning now and then to point at the statues like he’d made them himself.
“She was like you,” the garden said. “She could talk to things. She could make things happen. She never told anybody about it except for Earl. She thought she could trust him.”
The crowd clapped again. Someone shouted “Hallelujah” and anger flooded Misty’s body, heating her cheeks and the palms of her hands. The garden’s voice grew louder.
“But he was mean to her. He always was, right from the start. He hurt her until she didn’t want to be hurt anymore and she thought she’d found a way out. She’d heard stories before. About women who could change themselves. Turn into other things, like trees.”
Earl lifted his hands and shouted something, but his voice sounded dim and far away. Misty could only hear the garden whispering in her head, could only think of Aunt Jem and the story of Misty’s great-great-grandmother.
“She tried to convince the tree to bond with her,” the garden said, “but it told her she was too young. Too healthy. It said she should find another way to keep living, and come back to it when she was old and gray. It promised it would bond with her someday, but she was so tired of living. Of fighting. So she used our little trick. She bound her name with the tree’s and she joined it anyway. She felt bad at first, but she was free, finally, from Earl and from everybody who treated her bad and called her names, free from everybody who ever hurt her.”
A woman joined Earl in front of the fence. She smiled at him and said something to the crowd. Then she started to sing.
“But then Earl found her,” the garden said, “and he cut her down.”
Images flashed in Misty’s mind: Caroline’s hands sinking into the trunk of the dogwood tree, a light blinding and green inside her head, her vision shifting, changing, her body stretched and emptied, her roots spreading beneath her, digging deeper and deeper into the earth.
“He thought he killed her,” the garden said, “but he forgot the roots.”
White roots in dark soil, the green light flickering over the backs of the crawdads.
“Does that—does that mean she’s still there?” Misty asked. “In the ground?”
“She never left.”
Misty shook her head. “Is she okay? Can I talk to her?”
“You already have.”
Misty looked across the crowd of people at the statues. A tree, a spiral, an ax. She thought the statues had been about her and William and what happened in the barn, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe…
“Are you Caroline?” Misty asked.
“I was,” the garden said. “Once.” And then she slipped away from Misty like she had so many times, gone before Misty could ask her to stay.
The woman in front of the garden continued to sing. The sound of her, so pure and clean and bright, carried across the bottom like an unexpected rain, and Misty’s mother turned up her face so she might hear it better. Goose bumps broke across Misty’s arms as the woman’s voice reverberated between the trailers, caught in the dim space between all those bodies and trees that echoed the song back to her, that seemed to be singing along, like there were a hundred versions of that woman hidden all throughout the bottom and all of them, all of them were singing.
A woman near the back of the crowd began to stomp her feet. Her head was bowed almost to her chest, and little clouds of yellowed dust rose from her ankles. Shannon stepped back to give the woman more room, but the woman latched her hand around Shannon’s wrist, and Shannon began to dance, too. Her head fell back, exposing the long, pale line of her throat, then she whipped back just as fast. Her body jerked in four different directions, each part of her wanting to be somewhere else. She was pulled toward the earth, the sky, the barn, the pulpit, and so turned in spinning circles with her arms clenched tight at her sides.
The crowd shifted to allow the women room, and the more women who danced, the more who followed. One woman stood with her arms spread at her sides, bending forward and back, slow and even. Another shouted, another wailed, and the sound of them reverberated against the trees and returned,
doubled, even stronger, until the women cast it out again.
Misty’s mother lifted her eyes to the stars. Her whole body shook from top to bottom and she began to dance. Her feet stuttered over the grass, the blades worn to softness by so many feet. She clenched her hands into fists and pressed them to her chest like she was holding on to something there, some invisible line that kept her from floating off into the dark.
The air seemed to shimmer with some new feeling that the women shared, like the first crack in an egg, but not the breaking. A thin and perfect line racing through something that had been whole once, bound up tight, but the women were gates, opening; they were a lock, snapped. Burst, they spread, up and out, out of themselves, a firework crackle that sparked and sped back toward earth. A sheet pulled back to reveal the true shape of the thing beneath, a sheet that snapped their spines straight and sent them tumbling, tumbling.
It was a shed-and-gone feeling, like the slough of Misty’s skin from her bones, the heavy weight of all she carried pooled around her feet; it was an emptying, an outing, a fall and pouring.
“All these women know how it feels,” Caroline said, her voice surfacing suddenly. “To be hurt. To have nobody care. Do you see the one in the red dress? With her hands in the air?”
Misty watched Miss Gail dancing by the pulpit, Penny’s homeroom teacher who’d been at the prayer meeting the night everyone laid hands on Misty.
“She has nightmares every night,” Caroline said. “Something happened to her like it happened to you and she dreams about it. And the one spinning around and around?”
Misty looked at Shannon.
“She’s been hurt like you and me. Again and again. She doesn’t think that anyone will ever love her like she is.”
“That’s not true,” Misty said.
“And the one beside her. Do you know what happened to her?”
Misty’s mother stomped her feet in quick little bursts, her face held up to the sky, her hands gripped into tight fists at her sides.
“I don’t want to know,” Misty said.
“No,” Caroline said, “no you don’t. But I know. And it has to stop somehow. All this hurting. Do you know the easiest way to find a person’s name?”
“How?” Misty had wanted to know the answer to that question for so long, but she didn’t want to hear it like this.
“All you have to know is what’s hurt them most,” Caroline said. “You just need that one sharp piece of them that they never could let go of. The thing they never could say. And you can make them do almost anything.”
“What’re you going to do?” Misty asked, but the garden, Caroline, was already gone.
There was no music, because there were no voices left to sing. All the women were raptured, their bodies taken and shaking to a song that only they could hear. The bottom was dark except for the glow of the sodium lamp, and beneath it, the women’s bodies writhed.
William walked through the crowd of twisting women. They danced around him, and even with their eyes cinched tight, not a single woman came close to touching him. He stopped in front of his mother. Shannon spun on the tips of her toes, her heel falling and rising, but never resting for long. A shallow divot formed in the dirt beneath her.
William said something, but Shannon kept spinning. He said it again, louder, and again until Misty heard his voice over the stomping of the women’s feet: “Mama?”
But the women kept dancing.
They danced as the men gathered near the pulpit and talked in quiet whispers, glancing now and then at the women’s bodies.
They danced as Misty’s father came walking down the road toward the trailer. Penny was slouched at Misty’s feet, drifting in and out of sleep, and their father looked between them and the women and the pastor. He found Misty’s mother in the crowd, dancing with her chin dropped to her chest. His hands hovered by her shoulders like he was afraid to touch her, like she was sleepwalking and it might hurt to wake her. He tilted his head and looked down at her face, but she didn’t look back. She was looking at something else, something far away and inside herself that no one else could see. Sweat pooled along her forehead, running in thin streams along the back of her neck. Dark stains appeared on the back of her gray blouse until it clung to her like a second skin. Misty’s father said something, whispered close to her mother’s ear, and then he grabbed her shoulders. The muscles strained beneath his shirt as he tried to hold her still.
“Beth?” he said.
Next time, he shouted.
But still, she danced.
Thirty-Five
Someone called 911. The only ambulance in town came and picked up the oldest woman who was caught in the spirit, strapped her to a gurney, and hauled her away. The rest of the women had to be taken in cars, forced through narrow doors, their arms pinned to their sides but straining all the while, fighting until they shook loose, pale hands jittering at the ends of their wrists like birds struggling to fly.
William cried. He clung to his mother’s dress as someone forced a seat belt over her waist and shuffled William into the back seat. The other men remained blank-faced, their mouths set in rigid lines.
Misty’s father tried to send her and Penny inside the trailer, and they went, for a moment, but they both ran onto the porch and caught one last glimpse of their mother’s bare foot twitching through the open door of their father’s truck before he shut it and ran to the other side. Gravel pinged off the sides of the trailer as he peeled away.
For twenty minutes the girls had been home entirely alone, and all they could do was sit on the couch side by side. A few green strings still clung to the walls, held on by thin scrapes of tape. They shifted in the breeze from the open door.
“Are you hungry?” Penny asked after a while.
Misty shook her head.
“Me neither.”
“What’s going to happen to Mom?” Misty asked.
Penny shook her head. “I don’t know. I never seen anything like that.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m going to take the sheet down,” Penny said.
“What?”
“In our room. I’m going to take it down.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t think I’ve been very nice to you. I mean, you ain’t been nice, either, but two wrongs don’t make a right. And I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I know that something is, and me acting wrong ain’t going to help anything.”
“What?”
“I’m saying sorry.”
“Oh.”
“Do you forgive me?” Penny asked.
Misty nodded.
“All right. Can I ask you a favor?”
“Is that the only reason you said sorry? So you could ask me a favor?”
“No. Geez. Give me a minute to ask, all right?”
“Fine.”
“I keep thinking about those two threes. And how your now is the same as your…as your death, and I just don’t want you to do anything to make that happen, okay? Do you promise?”
Tears welled in Misty’s eyes as she nodded.
“A nod is a promise, okay?”
“Okay.”
Dolly’s car spun across the driveway a few minutes later, kicking gravel and dust into the air. She and Jem were arguing when they got out of the car and their voices echoed through the empty yard, the grass trampled flat, the statues glinting with waning moonlight. The minute they came through the door, they tried to feed the girls, but neither of them had an appetite. Penny asked if they could sleep in the living room, and Dolly dragged the mattresses from their beds and piled them full of pillows. She let them sleep with the television on, and Misty listened as Dolly and Jem whispered in the kitchen.
“What did he say?” Dolly asked.
“No change. They’ve got the women knocked out now. I reckon they had to
about break out the horse tranquilizers to get them under, but they’re all sleeping. It ain’t a coma, he said, but it’s close.”
“A coma?” Dolly’s voice rose an octave.
“Will you keep it down, big mouth? I don’t want them girls to worry.”
“I know, I know. I just… A coma? Ain’t that worse?”
“Not in the state they were in. I guess this buys the doctors some time to figure out what’s going on. If that head doctor don’t have some answers soon, I’m going to go down there and show him the real meaning of ‘emergency room.’”
They whispered some more about blankets and breakfast and what they would do with their children tomorrow before they walked into Misty’s mother’s bedroom and shut the door. Misty looked over at Penny, who lay beside her on her back, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.
* * *
All night Misty tossed and turned in bed. Her skin felt too sweaty, too close, too much. It was all too much. She didn’t know what to think about the garden now that she knew it had been Caroline all along. And that she had been trying to tell the world what happened to her all this time, praying that someone would listen. That someone would hear.
But no one did. Not even Misty. All this time she thought that the statues had been her fault somehow. That she had been making them happen with William and they reflected her own pain back to her, but it hadn’t been her. It had been Caroline.
And now, because of this, her mother was sick, her mother trapped in some faraway place for real this time, maybe for good. And Misty didn’t know how to help her, how to make Caroline set her mother and the other women free.
Misty clenched her hands into fists and her skin slid over her bones, the tips of her fingers gone numb as they tried to slip free of their skin.
But she couldn’t shed her body now.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 24
