In rural West Virginia, Joanie and her foster siblings live on a farm tending a mysterious plant called the vine. The older girls are responsible for cultivating the vine, performing sacred rituals to make it grow. After Joanie’s arranged marriage goes horribly wrong, leaving her widowed and with a baby, she plots her escape with the help of her foster brother, Cello.
But before they can get away, her baby goes missing and Joanie, desperate to find him, turns to the vine, understanding it to be far more powerful than her siblings realize. She begins performing generations-old rituals to summon the vine’s power and goes on a perilous journey into the wild, pushing the boundaries of her strength and sanity to bring her son home.
Daughters of the Wild is an utterly absorbing debut that explores the female mind in captivity and the ways in which both nature and women fight domination. Like The Bell Jar set in rural Appalachia, Daughters of the Wild introduces a fierce new heroine and a striking new voice in fiction.
Praise for
Daughters of the Wild
“A gorgeous, different, and completely engrossing book. Burian’s writing is transporting.”
—Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Object: A Memoir
“Daughters of the Wild is a preternatural and suspenseful novel from beginning to end.”
—Jennifer Baker, author of Everyday People: The Color of Life
“Luminous and transformative...this is a book about dignity, intuition, and the sustaining vine of friendship.”
—Courtney Maum, author of Costalegre
“A stunning portrait of a woman seeking to recover her stolen child and her own autonomy in the face of control and confinement.”
—Jessie Chaffee, author of Florence in Ecstasy
“A thriller, an unsettling Southern gothic and a feminist triumph all at the same time.”
—Iris Martin Cohen, author of Last Call on Decatur Street
“Gorgeously written and richly imagined page-turner that plows full speed across your heart. Writers like Karen Russell, Joy Williams, and Gabriel García Márquez spring to mind.”
—Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines
Also by Natalka Burian
Welcome to the Slipstream
A Woman’s Drink: Bold Recipes for Bold Women
Daughters of the Wild
Natalka Burian
NATALKA BURIAN is the cofounder of the Freya Project, a nonprofit reading series that supports community-based activism and the work of women and nonbinary writers. She is the author of Welcome to the Slipstream, a young adult book, and the cocktail cookbook A Woman’s Drink, and is the co-owner of two bars, Elsa and Ramona. This is her debut adult novel.
www.NatalkaBurian.com
For Jay
Contents
West Virginia, 1898
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
West Virginia, 1999
Acknowledgments
West Virginia, 1898
It was the middle of the night, but the sky screamed with light, knocking Helen Joseph awake. She rolled out of her blanket, almost crushing her dreaming baby sisters beside her on the floor. The cabin was filled with sleep; no one else had noticed that strange, streaky flash. Helen thought maybe she was still sleeping, but flowed along, anyway, following her legs out the door, following the thin, bright trail that lingered against the dark, stretching all the way to the place where it careened down.
Something had landed; she knew it. But she wasn’t sure if it had landed in her dream or on their farm. She walked up the mountain slope toward that twinkling plummet, surprised to feel that the ground was hot under her bare feet. The earth grew warmer and warmer as she drew closer, until she had to skip from step to step. The soil beneath her calloused feet rippled, alive as a serpent, shoving her off balance. Helen landed heavily against the thorny trunk of a cottonwood tree as the earth lurched under the impact of whatever star had just fallen. The lingering wash of light intensified. The brightness made her teeth hurt. She closed her eyes so tightly that her cheeks pinched, and waited for the rumbling to stop. It didn’t stop, not for a long while. With her eyes closed and her body stomach-down in the forest brush, it was like wrangling a semiwild dog, praying you didn’t lose the hot, moving creature to the open spaces beyond.
Helen felt this same kind of desperate holding, a blade of sharp regret waiting to slice through her if she let go and lost it. Eventually, like a settling animal, the earth quieted and cooled. Helen opened her eyes and stood up, straightening her forest-stained nightgown. The sky had grayed with daylight, so Helen didn’t have to squint her way through the wood looking for the fallen thing. She heard a sound humming through the quiet bodies of the trees and tracked it to its source, winding her way around churned-up stones and seasons-ago debris.
A hole in the ground—small, the size of a child’s closed fist—glowed jewel green and sang out at her. Not words. Just a feeling. Helen knew she was supposed to protect it with soil, and to care for it. The thing’s demands coiled around her feet and hands, gently pulling her forward.
Helen’s hands were planting-skilled, so she covered over the opening like she would any seed. Unlike any other seed, though, this one began to grow right away. A bright vine swirled and opened out around her in the space of two stunned breaths, in and out. The plant looped around her wrist, holding her where she still crouched in the dirt. The tie was not sinister. It was a connection. Helen wasn’t afraid or worried—she felt chosen, happy. Happier than she’d ever been. The vine pulsed out at her, a drumbeat of feeling, and she bent toward its caress as though receiving an answer.
As she dipped closer, a link between her and that gleaming astral coal snapped into place. She felt it, sudden and secure, in the space behind her belly button, like a lid on a pot. And just like that, Helen Joseph knew exactly what to do to keep this glowing creature alive.
1
West Virginia, 1998
The garden was quiet, submerged in the kind of heavy, consuming sleep a child needed. Long summer days provoked this kind of thorough repair, from the land itself and the people who tended it. Cello loved these summer sleeps for their forgiving softness, and the nourishing visions they brought him in the night. When Joanie shook him awake in the dark, a finger pressed against her mouth, he almost turned back into his soothing, murky dream. Almost—Cello could never say no to Joanie. He flung himself back into consciousness, back into the trailer with Joanie and his other foster siblings. She gathered her hooded sweatshirt close across her chest and pointed for him to follow her outside. He pulled on his boots and gently closed the trailer door.
Joanie was already huddled over a cigarette, shivering, even though the night was hot. Since the baby had been born, she seemed permanently chilled. Cello reached out to her, but instead of taking his hand like he hoped she would, she pass
ed him the burning Grand Prix.
“I found someone,” she said. The shoulder of her sweatshirt slipped down, exposing a too-sharp clavicle.
“What do you mean?” Cello tried not to look at the crescent of skin, and instead looked away, to where North River Mountain blotted out the clear night sky with its dark hunch.
“A buyer.” Joanie reached out for the cigarette and Cello passed it back without dragging from it.
“What? What do you mean a buyer?” he asked, wishing he sounded more confident, less confused. It was an unexpected proclamation. He and Joanie had nothing of their own to sell.
“Franklin Lees. He came to my wedding—that’s where I met him. He’s been trying to one-up Mother Joseph for years. Wants a crate of cuttings. From the Vine.” A slight tremor began in Joanie’s hands, and Cello saw the lit cigarette end wobble.
“No. Absolutely not,” he said, stepping toward her. He crossed his arms tightly, careful not to touch her. Of all the things at the garden that could be bought or sold, the Vine of Heaven was the only immutable constant. It had been there before them and would go on after them. Cello worked with it every day, but it was still a source of mystery—like cutting keys to doors he would never open. He knew that secretly removing the Vine from the garden was as impossible as removing his eyes from their sockets—it was the rule every member of their foster family understood. Letta would always know. Anytime it was pulled from the earth, she said she could feel it in her body. She had to lie down in the dark anytime a plot was cleared.
“The Vine belongs to me, too. I work hard enough for it. If I want to sell it, I should be able to sell it.” With a vicious tap, she sent a drift of glowing flecks from her Grand Prix onto the ground. “He’ll give me a car, Cello, and enough cash to really get away. Us, I mean. We can’t stay here anymore.” Cello didn’t ask if the “us” Joanie meant included the baby, or him, or all three of them. He saw the determination in the tensed muscles of her face and throat.
She had been closed off since the birth, like the separation of that little body from her own had torn her partially away from this world. But he also knew that Joanie was desperate enough to undertake the transaction without him, and that she would fail without his help. If she failed, and Mother Joseph found out, Joanie would be destroyed. Cello nodded into the dark, like a hypnotized man.
“Wait until tomorrow night, when it’s dark,” Joanie said, and Cello shuddered where he stood, trapped by Joanie’s grim resolve. “And make sure you wrap what you cut really tight. Like you’re smothering it. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“Alright, Joanie. Alright,” he answered, knowing it was what he would always say to her.
When Cello went back to bed, he dreamed of the earth splitting open. He dreamed of a crack running through the garden, upending the trailers and all of the old car carcasses in a rusty wave. The children screamed and scattered, and Joanie was swallowed up by that blank, dark seam, falling farther and farther into the center of the earth. Cello peered down into the crack, at the toes of his boots nearly dripping over the edge. Before he could jump in or run, his eyes flickered back open into their small, ordered world. The thin wail of Joanie’s baby woke him over the other sleeping bodies, and Cello jumped up to soothe him so the other kids could rest a little longer.
The baby slept in a crate in the trailer’s kitchen, and Cello had to step over Emil sleeping on a pallet of old blankets to reach him. The baby had a name, of course, but Cello hated to use it, hated that the baby bore the name of his biological father. Every time Cello held him, he was stunned in stupid love by the baby’s light, warm weight.
He took the child outside into the dewy night, and stared down into his blinking little face. The baby knew Cello loved him, as much as babies could know anything. If Joanie fled without him and took the baby, Cello didn’t think he would recover. But he didn’t know if he could endure a life away from the garden, either. His heart was buried as deep in the earth as the sacred Vine of Heaven that twisted and bloomed around them.
Mother Joseph had chosen each child and brought them to Letta and Sil and the garden’s fecund swirl. None of them really belonged there, but there they were, inexplicably held. Each child had come to the garden with a hastily signed, official document. Mother Joseph made sure this at least was done according to the law. Including Cello and Joanie, there were six of them. The youngest was Emil, who was five, followed by Miracle who was eight. Sabina and Marcela were older, thirteen and sixteen. Cello had always envied them a little for being real sisters.
The rest of them weren’t blood-related. They mostly looked alike, except for Cello. The kids had the same burned-tanned skin, and their hair and eyes were all shades of dark. Cello guessed that it was the way they lived—mostly outdoors, always out under the sun. Letta liked that they all looked the same. It was easier to pass them off as a family if anyone came to the farm.
Even Joanie looked that way: dark and darker. He was lighter than the others, even after years of working outside, and his hair was long and straight and blond. He hated how greasy he looked compared to the rest of them, how he looked like a stranger.
When the kids were old enough to ask, the questions came. They were a painful surprise each time. How did I get here? Will we always stay? There had never been any parents at the garden, only Sil and Letta. Parents had meant nothing—none of them had seen what it looked like for a mother to love a child until Joanie came home pregnant. When the tenderness began to show, when it started to lift from Joanie’s body like a haze of pollen, it had been Miracle’s turn to ask.
“There’s really a baby in her?” She combed her short, dark hair away from her face as she leaned in over Joanie’s belly.
“Of course, dipshit,” Marcela said.
“And it really comes out? Like an animal?” Miracle drew in her breath, astonished.
“Yeah,” Sabina said, her voice soft as she concentrated on rinsing out a round of washing in the sink. It was winter—February—when Joanie was nearly six months along. There wasn’t much to be done outside, so the six of them huddled in the kids’ trailer. Emil was asleep—still taking naps, he was so little.
“That’s how I came out?” Miracle asked. “Really?”
“Of course,” Cello told her.
“But Letta didn’t—”
“Oh, God, no!” Marcela called from her seat on the floor, scraping the peeling polish from her toenails.
“Then who?” Miracle had looked right at Cello then, her small mouth twisted, suppressing an enormous feeling.
“Who knows?” Marcela said, tying back her furiously curly hair. “You just showed up one day. Mother Joseph said she came by a new little one, and did Letta want to keep you.”
“Course Letta didn’t say no,” Sabina said, her smile a warm flare shot out specifically for Miracle. “You were the prettiest baby. And Sil was so happy. We had a drought then, and the day you came, it rained.”
“We saw Marcela and Sabina’s real mama,” Joanie said, looking up from her small globe of a belly.
“Who was she?” Miracle whispered.
Joanie looked over at Cello, unspooling the memory between them like two ends of a skipping rope. Mother Joseph’s truck had driven up to the trailers and the driver ejected a woman with a push from the cab. She was covered in lesions, a small, gaunt body wearing two different shoes. She’d dropped the children by the door like some macabre stork, and was swallowed back into the truck in the span of a minute. The two little girls hadn’t looked back once at the person who abandoned them. Marcela gripped her toddler sister against her side tightly and wailed when Letta first pulled them apart. Blood dribbled down Sabina’s soft little arms where Marcela’s uncut fingernails had held her close.
“She was nobody,” Marcela said as she lifted herself from the floor and moved to her sister’s side. She dipped her hands into the sink and bega
n to wring out the wet clothes that pooled there.
“You remember her? Did you ever see her again?” Miracle asked.
Sabina shook her head.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t, because I would’ve strangled her if I had.” Marcela violently unfurled a small, green T-shirt—Emil’s favorite—as she said it.
“What about Cello and Joanie?” Miracle asked, looking over to where they sat, Joanie on her cot, Cello on a plastic crate.
“We don’t have the same parents,” Cello said, knowing that wasn’t what Miracle had meant, but unwilling to tell her more.
“Well, Joanie’s baby’s gonna have a mom,” Sabina said, turning to nod at Miracle. “And that’s nice.”
“Yeah, if nobody tells Mother Joseph about it,” Marcela mumbled.
“Of course nobody’s gonna tell her,” Joanie said, propping herself up against the trailer’s thin wall. She shot Marcela a sharp look, as though pinning the conversation closed.
* * *
Cello wondered now, with the child in his arms, if someone had told on Joanie. It would explain her panic, and her urgency. If Mother Joseph had found out about the baby, of course Joanie would be desperate. He swore—on his own two hands—that he would do anything to keep Joanie and the baby safe. He felt the soft waves of the baby’s tiny snores even out, and because it was still nearly dark, Cello carefully set the baby down beside Joanie, and left to do what she had asked.
Cello would never have believed he could be coldly deceitful, that he could betray the only family he’d ever had so swiftly or so easily. But it was easy, because Sil and Letta didn’t suspect him. It was Joanie who they watched carefully—she was unpredictable. They watched Marcela, too, because she was selfish. Nobody watched compliant, steady Cello.
The chill of the almost-morning raised gooseflesh along Cello’s arms and on the back of his neck. Sil and Letta would still be sleeping. Cello decided to cut from the very first plot that had ever been planted at the garden, because Sil checked it the least. Cello secretly hoped the cuttings would languish away from their parent plant. That way, Franklin Lees wouldn’t get what he wanted, but Joanie would, and his loyalty to the garden wouldn’t be too corroded. He still felt a tingle of nausea as he approached the old grove, dripping with green and fragrance.
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