Daughters of the Wild

by Natalka Burian

  Joanie knew she wasn’t good like Cello. She knew she wasn’t shrewd like Letta. She began to wonder if maybe she was like Mother Joseph.

  “Whose tooth, then?” Joanie’s voice was cool, easy. She knew her mother-in-law was trying to unsettle her. But Joanie had lived with Letta her whole life, and knew exactly how to react.

  Mother Joseph’s full, body-vibrating laughter slowed to a subdued hiccup. “I guess you do have a strong stomach, Joanie. The last man who came near my mouth walked away short a ball.”

  “Well, I’m not a man.” Joanie kept her gaze level, just at the older woman’s ragged hairline.

  “No, I guess not. It’s Cher’s tooth that needs to be pulled.” Mother Joseph whistled through her teeth. A large brindle mutt loped over to the cluster of decaying lawn furniture. Cher was Mother Joseph’s personal pet. It was a test, Joanie knew. In a way, pulling Cher’s tooth was a greater show of confidence in Joanie’s potential than marriage to Josiah.

  “Now?” Joanie asked, easing her body out of the chair.

  “Course now—isn’t that right, my lamb?” Mother Joseph reached for the dog’s muzzle, pulling it wide-open, even as the animal whimpered and trembled. “That one, you see? In the back, bottom left. It’s all black.”

  Joanie set her coffee cup on the ground and squinted inside against the animal’s foul, hot breath. “I see it. You gonna hold her?” she asked Mother Joseph without looking at her, while staring into the filthy, dark cave of Cher’s mouth.

  “Sure, I’ll hold her.”

  “We could always tie her down.” Joanie knew she sounded cruel. She wanted Mother Joseph to know that she, too, could be cruel.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that to Cher.” Mother Joseph cooed and stroked the dog’s back.

  “Fine. You got pliers?”

  Mother Joseph nodded toward the slat-patched, corrugated metal shed beside the driveway.

  “I’ll be back in a minute. Calm her down, I guess.” Joanie removed the open padlock that looped a chain keeping the door shut. The dim light inside shook something out of Joanie—a realization that something was really changing. Now she was really part of the Josephs’ domestic snarl. A quarter-size spot of pain formed in the center of her forehead, and she rubbed at it with the heel of her hand. Pliers, okay, here we go, Joanie thought. She took the least-rusty-looking tool from a shelf tacked to the wall and closed the chain with the padlock.

  She swiftly walked back to the woman and the dog, her steps evenly spaced and graceful. Mother Joseph had gathered Cher up against her chest. When Joanie saw that Cher’s body was clamped in place, she moved right up to the dog’s limp, pink tongue, pressing it down with her thumb. She took Cher’s snout, squinted at the fuliginous tooth, clamped the pliers on it and drew it out with a jerk, along with her hand.

  The animal wailed, a horrible sound that made Joanie sick with guilt. She tried not to show it, though she couldn’t help turning her face away from the whimpering dog, and the blood streaming from her mouth. She knew Mother Joseph was watching her. Joanie threw the pliers, still clasping the dripping tooth, to the grass at Mother Joseph’s feet. “If you need anything else,” she said, “you know where I’ll be.”

  “I knew you’d have a steady head. You did good, girl!” Mother Joseph called after her. “So good, I’m gonna let you decide from now on whether Josiah gets his medicine or not.” Joanie froze at the thought, but also thrilled at the possibility of what it would mean to shoulder one of Mother Joseph’s tasks. It felt to her like the beginning of something important—the beginning of some transfer of power. Joanie shivered as she walked away, and Mother Joseph’s voice softened as she crooned to the trembling pile of dog in her lap. “Didn’t she do good, honey? Oh, you’re alright, quit the fuss.”

  This makes me one of them now, Joanie thought as she walked away. She stepped firmly, trying to press back the nausea she felt with each footprint.

  Joanie thought she was going to feel like a Joseph on the day of her wedding, but she didn’t feel anything at all. Instead, she numbly observed the differences between her old family and her new one.

  In the chill of the courthouse hall, Joanie looked not at her future husband, but at her future mother-in-law. Set against Letta’s rangy height and gaunt face, Mother Joseph was substantial, significant—a monument in some ancient city that had weathered thousands of years filled with storms and riots. Standing, Mother Joseph seemed biblically enormous—wide and tall, swollen with matriarchal importance.

  Joanie studied Josiah’s pinched carp’s face, the tiny pointed nose and chin that swam up out of the fleshy pond of his cheeks and thick forehead. She looked for a trace of Mother Joseph’s grandeur in that face, and saw none. Mother Joseph hadn’t given her a prized family possession—she realized quickly that Josiah was a trap, insurance. Josiah brought nothing to Joanie. It was Joanie who now belonged to them. It was through Joanie that Mother Joseph would collar Letta even more tightly.

  And Joanie smiled, straight into Josiah’s bloated face, because she knew that she could help Mother Joseph. She wanted to help, because when, really, would she get another chance to put Letta in her place?

  After that third day, she wasn’t so sure. Obeying Mother Joseph—submitting in a way she had never submitted to Sil and Letta—and pulling the dog’s tooth had shaken something loose in her. She didn’t like how changed she felt, as though all the molecules in her body had been rearranged.

  Mother Joseph moved them into their permanent room the morning after Cher’s procedure. Until then, they’d had a sad, shambolic honeymoon in the Josephs’ single guest trailer set back in the woods.

  The room was cold—Joanie felt the keen autumn air slipping through the unsealed window by the bed. It was only going to get worse; she decided to fix it before the first rain or snow. The scent of mildew and traces of sweat hung thickly around them. Joanie’s bag was already on the bed. She grimaced when she thought about Mother Joseph, or any of the others, touching her things.

  “I don’t know how Letta taught you to set up house, but I like things neat. You take something, you put it exactly back where you found it. I don’t wanna have to go looking for things. Don’t make me do that.”

  “No, Mother Joseph, I won’t.” Joanie stood quiet, a few feet away from Josiah. His tiny eyes incrementally widened in the late-afternoon gloom. He clutched a glass aquarium against his chest, swaddled in an old towel that had been washed so often that it had lost all color.

  “You keep your creepy-crawlies in your room, Josiah. It’s only since you’re married now that I’m letting that goblin in the house.”

  When Josiah set the aquarium on top of the room’s rickety dresser, Joanie didn’t know what the creature inside would become to her. It would be her anchor, that turtle, when the worst of it started—when Mother Joseph became fully disappointed in her new daughter-in-law. When Joanie ceased to be herself, it was Josiah’s pet trapped in the aquarium that got her off the floor. The last, full-brained thought she’d had was about that poor turtle, its warped shell clamoring against the glass aquarium tank.

  * * *

  That her baby was half-Joseph, Joanie couldn’t undo. But he was half her, too, and she’d do whatever she could to find him. She knew there was no question of them going to the police, and doing whatever it was a regular mother would do under the same circumstances. She knew that there was only one place for them to go.

  Sil had been driving, directionless, for the better part of an hour. He kept looking at her, giving Joanie nervous part-smiles, part-grimaces. He was waiting for her to say it. She knew that Sil was too soft to force her back to the Joseph compound. He hadn’t forgotten the state of ruin she had been in when she left.

  “I guess we better check out the Josephs’ place,” Joanie said, watching Sil’s hands on the wheel.

  He didn’t turn to look at her, his eyes on the windshield. �
��You sure about that?”

  “What else can we do?”

  He nodded and slowed the truck, then made a U-turn in the middle of the road.

  Joanie tried to remember what it had been like to feel the way she’d felt on that third morning—powerful, commiserating. She could at least try to fake it, to unnerve her former mother-in-law. Under no circumstances would she let Sil in alone. Joanie was the only one who would know if Amberly Joseph was lying.

  Sil pulled the truck into a little dusty polygon where the Josephs parked their scabby assortment of vehicles. Joanie opened the passenger side door and slid to the ground, relieved that none of her former family were standing around and smoking in the lot as they often did. She felt that dangerous shimmer in the air, too—one of Mother Joseph’s protections.

  She and Sil walked the winding gravel path to the main house, the house Joanie had lived in, been hurt in—the house she thought she’d die in. Sil walked slightly ahead; maybe, Joanie thought, to protect her, maybe to show the Josephs that he was in charge. Once they were in front of the peeling white painted door, Joanie was the one to knock.

  When the door creaked open, Joanie slouched in relief; Harlan, one of the cousins, and not Mother Joseph, answered the door. Harlan had never frightened her, even when he’d meant to. He was ancient compared to the rest of them, with a body covered in patches of thin, white hair. Harlan had always disgusted her, not least of all because he was one of Mother Joseph’s favorites.

  “Well?” Harlan said as he eyed them there on the porch.

  “Lady of the house in?” Sil asked.

  “No, gone on an errand.” Harlan looked straight at Joanie. “Didn’t expect to see you again,” he said to her.

  Joanie gave him a thin smile. “Me, either.” She leaned in toward the open door, testing the thickness of the air. Joanie thought she would be able to taste if her baby was inside.

  “Can we come in and wait?” Sil asked.

  “’Fraid not. After the trial, we weren’t supposed to see this one again.” Harlan pointed at Joanie in a sideways thumbs-up.

  “We’ll wait out here. On the porch,” Joanie said quickly. She felt fury bloom in her very pit. Harlan, always so loose-brained, had let slip one thing Joanie hadn’t known. Mother Joseph didn’t want her back—didn’t want to even look upon her. Letta had lied. There was no chance of her coming back. Staring through the open door where Harlan stood, she felt light-headed. The familiar smell of the house, and the shadows of the objects that belonged there, struck her in a suffocating wave. The last time she’d been inside was the trial Harlan had mentioned, her trial.

  “Fine by me,” Harlan said, closing the door and keeping them out.

  “You didn’t hear anything, did you?” Sil asked. “I mean,” he said, lowering his voice to an exaggerated whisper, “no crying or anything like that?”

  Joanie shook her head. She wanted to sit, but didn’t want any part of her body to touch anything that belonged to Mother Joseph. Sil saw the plume of dust in the driveway before Joanie did, and squeezed her arm a little.

  “Should we go on out by the car? Quick getaway and all,” he said.

  “No, let’s wait for her here.” Joanie walked down the decomposing steps into the front yard so she wouldn’t be trapped on the porch.

  Joanie could smell Mother Joseph before she saw her lumbering up the gravel path. The unmistakable scent of the old woman’s perspiration and Pert Plus carried into the yard. Joanie set her hands on her hips, and felt the heat from Sil’s body as he edged in toward her.

  Mother Joseph stopped abruptly as soon as she saw Joanie, and dropped the blue-and-white plastic bag in her hand. Two of Josiah’s cousins who had accompanied Mother Joseph on her errand flanked her.

  “Cy,” Mother Joseph said, talking though her teeth. “Get my gun from the car.”

  “No, no, no,” Sil called, waving his hands in the air, forcing a chuckle. “We’re not here for any trouble, Mother Joseph.”

  Joanie noted that Cy disappeared despite Sil’s protestations.

  “Silvanus, I don’t want to hear it. I told y’all I didn’t want to set eyes on this child again. She should be dead,” she added. “She’s a demon. Only reason she’s still living and breathing. If you bring a demon to me, I’ll fight it.” She nodded at the man beside her. He lunged at Joanie, and she felt, before she really understood the physics of his attack, his hands at her throat, a single plastic bag, now empty, its contents scattered on the grass, wrapped around her neck. Joanie noted the specifics of the pain—the hard bite of the plastic against the soft part of her throat, and the burning in her lungs as she pulled deep from the air around her to get enough to keep her standing on her own. She felt something like a laugh caught between those lungs and that throat, because whatever this was, it was nothing compared to what she’d already endured on the Josephs’ place.

  “Let’s all just stay calm,” Sil said.

  “Calm! After that demon slaughtered my boy?” Mother Joseph looked back to the space where Cy had returned, training his weapon on the visitors.

  “One of our valuables went missing,” Sil said, clipping each word off so that there could be no misunderstanding him. Joanie watched Mother Joseph’s incredulous reaction—rage was the only emotion that splashed over her features. There was no complexity to that particular brand of anger; Joanie knew from experience. It was a basic, unforgiving heat.

  “And you thought you’d just drop by and throw around accusations?” Mother Joseph yelled now.

  “Nothing like that, Mother Joseph. Only we thought you might’ve heard something. From one a y’alls...tenants.” Sil shifted his weight over his two feet, back and forth, as though his boots were a size too small. Tenants—a generous word, Joanie thought, to describe the users who flocked to the Joseph place. They slept in the woods at the edge of the property line, working whatever odd and unsavory jobs the Josephs needed done. They haunted the perimeter of the compound, willing to do anything, to ingratiate themselves in any way, in return for a taste of the Vine and Mother Joseph’s benevolence.

  “Get off this property, Sil,” Cy said.

  “Shut your mouth, Cy,” Mother Joseph said. “I know that Letta didn’t tell you to come out here.”

  “No, ma’am,” Sil lied. “Just looking for some information from our nearest and dearest.”

  “Well, what I can tell you is that I always thought you were a slimy piece of work, and Letta must’ve lost her mind playing house with you.” Mother Joseph pointed an arthritis-warped finger at Sil. “What I can tell you is I don’t want you coming around here again. In fact, I can’t be sure I can do business with y’all again.” She nodded at Cy, and he released the safety with a click. “Maybe I’ll pay you all a visit and pack up what’s mine. What I gave you out of the kindness of my heart. Familial love.”

  Sil dipped his head and looked toward the ground, his forehead creased. “No, no need for that. We’ll be on our way, Mother Joseph. We won’t bother you no more.” Sil took Joanie’s arm, firmly, eyeing the hands at her throat.

  Mother Joseph tilted her head to the side and whistled. “Shoot,” she said. “You really think you’ll be ‘on your way.’” She aped Sil’s cadence, putting a whine on it. “Just like that? Cy, shoot him in the leg.”

  “Sil’s got something new for you, though,” Joanie said, her voice struggling into the sound. The man behind her tightened the plastic, and kneed her legs open. He pulled her harder against his body, and she felt the rot of him all over the backs of her bare legs.

  “That’s right,” Sil said, his palms turned up and outward in supplication. “Brand-new product. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “By the heavenly Vine.” Mother Joseph propped her hands on either side of her impressive belly. “Y’all are almost too pathetic.” She rolled her eyes, head tilted back, for an instant like a woman se
ized.

  “No, ma’am, I really got something. I been working with the Vine and some of my jimsonweed. A hybrid—it’s beautiful. Lots of stalks and blossoms on these, and they need less space. I been trying them out in one of my test plots, and it’s coming up beautiful.” Sil gestured eagerly, as though trying to paint a visual aid onto the air. Joanie wasn’t sure if Sil’s reply was just for show, or if it was genuine.

  “Well?” Mother Joseph said, turning back to Cy, one of her wiry eyebrows raised. Cy shook his head.

  “Couldn’t hurt to take a look.” The man holding Joanie spoke. His voice, Joanie could hear and smell, was wet with dip. His hands sagged a little as he turned to inspect Sil. Joanie took a full breath as the plastic around her throat loosened.

  Sil nodded. “Usually it’s real finicky. But this batch come up perfect, I mean picture-perfect. My boy and I’ve been using something special, and the Vine’s loving it. Mixing it into the topsoil. It’s got a couple of different kinds of fungus, and—”

  “Lord, give me strength!” Mother Joseph called up into the sky. “I don’t give a solitary shit what you cocksuckers’re doing with your topsoil. Bring it ’round next delivery and I’ll try it.”

  Joanie could see Sil’s body sway with relief.

  “No, never mind, I don’t mean that.” Mother Joseph guffawed and bent double in her amusement. “I never want to see either of you out here again. Send Letta with it. ’Cause if I do happen to see you again out here, y’all can count on being shot on the spot. Shot on the spot, shot on the spot.” She clapped her hands along with the rhyme. “What do you think about that?”

  Cy giggled nervously behind her.

  “Alright, alright, let her go.” Joanie fell forward a step when she was released. Mother Joseph backed up, reflexively, at Joanie’s sudden movement toward her. Joanie couldn’t suppress a familiar pinch of excitement, the kind she got when she’d won something, even something as small as a step.