Daughters of the Wild

by Natalka Burian

  Sil and Cello hovered on either side of the rickety girl. They passed through the Joseph property without a sound. Sil lifted Joanie into the truck, and Cello swung in beside her. He wanted to hold her hand, to hold her entire body. Sil started the truck and let out an audible lungful of air when the engine turned over.

  “It’s over now,” he said.

  “For you, maybe,” Joanie muttered.

  Once they were home, it all fell out of Joanie. She was tucked up in Letta and Sil’s trailer, and Marcela fed her canned soup from a mustard-yellow mug. The little kids dozed on the bed around Joanie’s feet. Sil waited outside; Cello thought he probably didn’t want to hear about it. Letta sat on a stool at the doorway of the bedroom and waited. When Joanie started to talk, it was like she couldn’t help herself; the words ran out of her mouth in all of their snarled ugliness. Mother Joseph had treated her like an animal. Josiah had been wretched, but she swore she hadn’t killed him. When Letta pressed, Joanie refused to talk about the trial. She’d stopped bleeding, she said, and then went quiet.

  Marcela and Letta looked at each other. Even Cello knew what it meant.

  “When, Joanie? When did you notice it?” Letta asked.

  “Two months, probably. I was hoping it would die. Or maybe I would.”

  “Just stop that.” Analetta’s tone was sharp. “Whatever happened, at least you came home with something.”

  “Nothing I asked for,” Joanie muttered.

  “I mean it, Joanie. Stop that.”

  “Will you tell the Josephs?” Marcela asked.

  “Have you lost your natural mind, girl? I wouldn’t let Mother Joseph get her hands on a dog I liked.”

  “Thanks, Letta,” Joanie said through a twisted, caved-in smile.

  “You know that’s not what I meant.” Letta leaned in to inspect Joanie’s injured neck and shoulder. “This looks like something I’ve seen before,” she said, squinting at the elaborate pattern of swirling discolored skin. Letta’s mouth turned down abruptly. “Amberly seen this? In the light?”

  “I don’t know.” Joanie shook her head. “Probably not.”

  Letta set a towel filled with ice over the mark and smoothed Joanie’s hair back. “Really, honey, what did you do? They aren’t evil people.”

  “They aren’t?” Cello’s voice felt too loud again. He crossed his arms over his chest tightly, trying to stand still.

  “Get out of here, Cello,” Marcela said.

  “This is only for women to talk about,” Letta added.

  “No, I want Cello to stay.”

  Cello couldn’t be sure Joanie had said it. Maybe all of that longing had sent him spinning into hallucination. Nobody looked at him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered down at the peeling laminate floor.

  Cello knew that he should be sad for Joanie. And he was—he was sad and angry that others had hurt her, that her body had been insulted in so many ways. But his thrill at her return was a euphoria unlike any feeling he’d ever known. It felt like everything was going exactly right, exactly how it was supposed to go. Even as he watched Joanie’s body swell and her moods plummet and darken, he felt that there had never been such perfection in the world. Everything he did, he did more easily.

  When Sil made him pack up the truck before the sun was out, it was like flying. The work in the cold, fingers numb with it, shivering out under the weak sunlight in the middle of nowhere—it was paradise as far as Cello was concerned. Because Joanie was back.

  Cello sifted through the night he and Sil had taken Joanie home, scanning it for anything that could help him find the baby. He couldn’t dip into that memory, though, without feeling flooded with relief. I want Cello to stay, she’d said. His impending covert visit to the Joseph place seemed suddenly less risky, backlit as it was by that honeyed recollection. All he wanted was to bring the baby home. All he wanted was for Joanie, for all of them, to come back to themselves.

  8

  Cello and Marcela set out just as the sun began to drift out of sight behind the ragged mountain skyline. When Cello told Sil he was going back, that he needed to check again, one last time, Sil had only nodded. When Cello and Sil were on the same side of something, Cello could almost see the harmony between them. Sil told them to leave before dark so that they wouldn’t have to switch on the truck’s headlights. He even suggested they walk part of the way to make sure they weren’t seen.

  “I didn’t agree to walking,” Marcela said.

  Despite her protestations, Cello parked half a mile out on the unlined access road covered by a dense cluster of pines. He pulled an empty milk crate from the truck bed and carried it along. The night was thick with the sound of insects. It swelled and pulsed around them, and Cello considered the thousands of tiny, brittle lives dipping into and dropping out of the world. He prayed that the baby’s life was still lambent among them.

  As they walked, Marcela was completely silent. If Cello hadn’t known that they’d driven there together, he would have wondered if he imagined her presence beside him. His own feet were clumsy, knocking stones out of place—but nothing, not even the sound of breathing, came from Marcela.

  There was no plan, really. They were simply there to observe, to look and listen for anything out of the ordinary. Not that they knew what was ordinary for the Josephs. Not that anything they were doing, or had done, was ordinary. A sagging, chicken-mesh fence laced with barbed wire ran around the perimeter of the property. Cello stomped down into the hip-high trough of the fence segment with his work boot, to give them a little room, and then pushed the empty crate up to it. He hopped up and over it, grimacing at the noise he made when he fell to the other side.

  Marcela jumped over after him, and a flare of light spat out around her feet and then instantly disappeared, as though she’d dropped into a temporary, glowing puddle. Cello raised his eyebrows and she shrugged as they moved forward with care.

  Cello’s thoughts were now on the underfed dogs that patrolled the tall grass. The windows of the main house were still lit ahead of them. Cello pointed farther left, and Marcela nodded, clutching on to a scrap of Cello’s shirt. They moved slowly, together, Cello willing Marcela’s silence and ease of movement to cloak him, too. They were hunched over, and for a moment Cello wondered if one of the Josephs would mistake them for a beast—a renegade deer or horse—and shoot them. He decided the Josephs would probably shoot at them even if they knew they were people.

  The outbuildings were completely dark: black holes in the night. Cello listened. For a moment he thought he heard a cry. Marcela mirrored his pause, then touched him lightly on the shoulder. He looked at her and saw her pointing up, toward a swoop of bats wailing out around one another. He nodded and they moved on to the first outbuilding. It was an abandoned smokehouse. Cello smelled the stench of mold and decaying rodent carcasses. He pressed his hands into the rough, fieldstone wall in front of him, hoping they could set up some kind of base behind it. He motioned to Marcela to stay put, but she shook her head, and followed him inside.

  Cello left Marcela by the door. He scanned the low-ceilinged room for movement, for a fresh, living scent, anything. He realized, with a terrible sinking feeling, that if the baby was anywhere—that is, if he were still alive—the only place he could be was in the main house. Not even Mother Joseph would leave the baby in a place like the smokehouse, or the shed where they’d found Joanie all those months ago.

  Cello circled back around to Marcela and spoke, but just barely. “We have to check the main house.”

  He saw the flicker of Marcela’s loose hair as she violently shook her head. He leaned back in. “It’s okay, you wait here. I’ll go.” He felt her small, strong fingers pinch a layer of his skin as she grasped his shirt more tightly. He felt, rather than saw, her repeated, vehement refusal. Cello moved toward the doorway, and Marcela followed. Cello paused when he heard the sound of alcohol-slu
rred voices, and the yelping of a dog.

  “What’s that, Win, what’d you hear?” Cello couldn’t be sure which Joseph the voice belonged to, but lucky for him and Marcela, it sounded like it came from an old one. They could outrun one elderly, drunk Joseph, he thought with a burst of relief, but stiffened again when he considered all of the weapons the Josephs kept on their place. Maybe they’d be lucky. Maybe the old Joseph would be too drunk to aim; but then that noise would lead to other, more able-bodied Josephs giving chase, maybe aiming better. Cello squinted hard, trying to pick out shapes in the night. He couldn’t really see around the door, and the squinting made his head ache.

  Marcela plucked at his forearm, forcing him to turn toward her. She pressed a nail-bitten finger hard against her mouth, and then tugged on her ear. He saw her eyes, wide as they could open, willing him to understand. She tugged on her ear again, and then mimed rocking a baby in her arms.

  Cello nodded. She was right—if the baby was there, maybe the old, drunk Joseph would talk about it. They waited, and the stiffened backs of Cello’s leg muscles quivered. Marcela was like nothing, just air behind him.

  The old man whistled bright little scraps of songs that Cello didn’t know. They waited a long time—long enough for Cello’s legs to tingle with numbness, and he knew if they didn’t hear something about the baby soon, they’d have to find a way to disappear undetected. The smokehouse stank of decay, and as his eyes adjusted, Cello saw the outline of low piles of debris, studded with the bright outlines of small, linked bones. Mice, or rats, Cello thought—more than one would expect in a space so small. What had happened in this room? he wondered.

  Marcela glided toward the ramshackle pattern of bones, circling it. She paused in two places where the chalky outline broke. She crouched down and swiftly replaced the bones that had rolled or shifted out of order. He squinted into the dark, trying to make out whatever pattern she’d seen there. Cello stayed put, shifting his weight from foot to foot, when the old man began to sing to his dog.

  The song, if it could be called that, ran from wrong note to wrong note; the singer’s broken voice, veined with hundreds of thousands of cigarettes, drove the dog to wailing. Cello saw the flash of the animal’s tail, as it whisked in and out of sight. The dog sidestepped away from the man into full view of the deteriorating smokehouse and its missing door. The dog stilled, bristling from end to end. The old man interrupted his song to speak to the dog. “What is it, boy? Possum?”

  The dog lunged into the doorway, and Cello and Marcela fell back against the wall. Cello hoped getting up to investigate would be beyond the ancient singer, and was relieved when the old Joseph began the irregular melody, picking up where he left off.

  The dog leaped straight toward Marcela, who had clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from shouting out. She locked her other arm against her body and Cello kept his stance loose and neutral, balling his fists. They’d grown up outside. Marcela and Cello knew what to do if an animal wanted to hurt them: nothing. Cello kept his gaze down, away from the dog’s, and made a low, nonchalant humming sound in his throat, the way he’d heard Sil do it. The dog seemed well-fed, which meant they’d probably be fine, but Cello saw in its form that nervous forward lean, typical of a creature subjected to regular abuse.

  “Get out of there!” grumbled the old man. “I’m talking to you.” Marcela’s eyes squeezed tight, and a pale glow flared out from the pattern of bones, swift as a blink.

  In his peripheral vision, Cello saw the dog seize up, as though shot or struck, before he turned around and scampered out. When the dog cleared the doorway, Marcela lunged for Cello, pulling him away from the door.

  “Let’s go,” she hissed.

  Cello nodded, but still strained to hear the old man’s voice. If they could only wait a little longer, he thought. Marcela prodded him, hitting a bruise left over from Sil’s disciplining. Cello jumped a little and kept himself from crying out. He leaned forward, hands in the dirt, and fell onto something. It was about the size of his palm. He lifted the object into the weak light coming through the doorway and saw that he held the case of a turtle’s shell. It was not alive—the creature inside had been dead a long time. The shell, though, had been defaced—carved into. Cello traced the grooves and discovered a series of letters roughly scratched into the shell’s uneven surface. The muddled letters and strange symbols were illegible, except for a small crawl of undulating, linked semicircles. Cello knew that drawing. He’d seen it drawn into the mud, etched into the kids’ trailer wall, permanent-markered onto T-shirts. The pattern was Joanie’s sign of protection.

  “Okay,” he whispered.

  They pushed out a solitary half shutter in the smokehouse’s back wall and slithered out of the narrow opening.

  “What was that?” Cello asked, once they were in the safety of the truck’s sight line.

  “What was what?” Marcela asked.

  “That thing, with the bones. What did you do?” Cello opened the door, illuminating a small patch of night.

  Marcela’s expression hardened. “I don’t know, I just did it. I couldn’t help it.” She climbed into the truck and crossed her arms, clutching her opposite elbows as though for warmth.

  “Whatever it was, I think it saved us.” Cello squinted into the night and tried to be grateful that he and Marcela hadn’t been hurt or seen. Mostly, though, he was furious—the kind of furious that brought tears to his eyes. They’d found nothing, and he had failed Joanie and her baby again.

  * * *

  Back at the garden, Sil was not surprised by their failure.

  “Least you didn’t get caught,” he said when they returned. Sil—and only Sil—had waited up under the light of a bug lamp.

  “I’m going to bed,” Marcela said, her face still tight from their errand. She breezed past them into the kids’ trailer.

  “Don’t wake them up, Marcela! Have some decency at this hour,” Sil called after her.

  “Uh, you’re welcome,” Marcela said, and slammed the door shut.

  “That girl is going to be more of a problem than you and Joanie put together.” Sil pointed his burning cigarette squarely at Cello. “Really, y’all didn’t find anything?”

  Cello shook his head.

  “Well, okay.” Sil pulled a squashed pack of Grand Prix from his back pocket and passed it to Cello. “Go to bed—we got an early day. I want to take up some of that hybrid in the morning.”

  “You think it’s ready?” Cello asked. “Could use a couple more weeks. Even just one week would do it good.”

  Sil shrugged. “We’ll see. Josephs want a batch. You and Letta are gonna deliver it, okay?”

  “If that’s what you want.” Cello paused, nearly leaving his next question unasked. “What do we do now? About the baby?”

  “Well, shit. We just got to keep going like normal, I guess,” Sil said. “Letta’s right about this, like she always is.”

  “And is that alright with you?” Cello asked. He tried to keep his voice calm, but his hands trembled, and the Grand Prix between his teeth wouldn’t catch the quavering flame.

  “No, it’s not alright,” Sil said. “I love that child same as the rest of you. But what else can we do? Can’t call the authorities.” Sil’s voice was pitched high, but he wasn’t quite shouting.

  “There’s no guarantee they’d come here,” Cello said as he scratched his neck in the place where it disappeared under his frayed T-shirt collar. “They could still look for him, you know—” he gestured with his cigarette beyond the garden “—out there.”

  “Course they’ll come here! Don’t you understand how it works?”

  “I’m just worried about him.” Cello flushed; maybe it was from anger, maybe embarrassment.

  “We should just try to forget him for now,” Sil said. The way he said it, it was like the words hadn’t come from his own mind. It was like Sil
had snatched the thought out of the air before him.

  Cello looked away and they didn’t say anything else, only letting the night close in around them until it was too much, too heavy. Cello went for a walk and smoked under the clear sky, checking on each of the lush, curling plots. He squinted in the dark at a narrow groove in the grass at the edge of the property line—some unfamiliar track. He couldn’t tell if it was human made, or how old it was, but he knew he would investigate it. Anything to find the baby.

  9

  The sky was lit by a plump, white moon. Joanie swam under its light, crowded with thoughts. The water was too warm—the day had been long and the sun strong. The creek was the temperature of other bodies, of the blood suspended in those bodies. Joanie ducked her head under the surface, and tried to conjure up the winter. She imagined the stripped branches and her nose running from the cold. She tried to place herself anywhere else. On a mountaintop, a pair of heavy boots on her feet, the baby bundled close against her chest. She felt a hysterical gurgle at the base of her throat, and the burn of keeping it silent. Everything had been ruined so quickly.

  When Joanie left the Josephs’ that winter night a year before, she really believed it was for the last time. That she’d returned to their compound—voluntarily, and ultimately for nothing—hurt. It was her fault now, if whatever dam she’d built against Mother Joseph’s influence had disintegrated. Joanie knew the garden wasn’t safe for her and the baby. She needed to get away. Mother Joseph would always be too close, and she would never forget about Joanie, about what she was.

  She remembered the first Sunday after Cher’s procedure, when Mother Joseph led her into the smokehouse. She’d flicked on a fluorescent strip of overhead lights and illuminated a fireplace wide enough to lie down in. Over it, on a nineteenth-century iron hook and ring, hung an enormous steel pan. Piles of the Vine, prepared by Joanie and her foster siblings’ hands—and other hands like theirs over the ten-mile network of farms Mother Joseph reaped from—were stacked beside a wooden trough that had been pushed up against one wall.