Daughters of the Wild

by Natalka Burian

  “No, there was definitely some other reason.” Marcela wrinkled her nose and artlessly wrestled a dozen, semiripe tomatoes from the closest plant.

  “Sabina’s gonna kill you,” Cello said. He separated runner beans from their stems with the same care he’d use petting a cat.

  Marcela snorted and they worked on. “You know,” she said, interrupting the silence. “You can trust me. If there’s something going on, you can say so.”

  Cello looked at her extravagantly open face. He felt guilty, leaving her out of everything. Before he could answer, the sound of a bicycle’s wheels rushing through the grass interrupted them. Cello turned his body toward the invisible bike. “Hell, no,” he said, and dropped their dinner harvest to chase after it. The rider, whoever it was, was not supposed to be there. Protecting the borders of the garden was like a reflex, and Cello and Marcela followed the fresh serpentine track pressed into the grass almost without thinking. As Cello stared down, he noticed that the print of the tire was identical to the track he’d found in the dark.

  “Look,” Marcela panted, “they turned here.” She pointed to a small smear of trampled grass and then she was leading, Cello running after her. Who could it be? Cello wondered. Some idiot tourist trying to mountain bike? They’d definitely found a bewildered one of those before, shirt dusted with pollen, sweat running freely from a too-tight helmet. More likely, Cello thought, filling with anger, it was the kidnapper.

  Marcela broke through the layer of camouflage first. Cello saw the lengths of cable twined with leaves before she did—a crude screen. Marcela tripped and fell on her knees, all of her hair flopping forward over her face. Cello slowly stepped through the gap she’d made, thinking maybe something bigger than they’d imagined was going on. Maybe it had nothing to do with the missing baby. Maybe it was a secret hustle arranged between Letta and one of the other farms in Mother Joseph’s bailiwick. The glint of the toppled bike drew Cello’s eye. Behind the bike stood a boy, a boy Cello had never seen before.

  He was suddenly overheated, an unfamiliar mist of emotion suspended around him. Had the boy come for Joanie? Had he taken the baby, and just now come back for her? A haze of jealousy tinged that other, strange, tropic acknowledgment. Marcela stood between them, suddenly blocking the boy from view. Was the boy there for Marcela? It seemed unlikely, but Cello was smart enough to understand the coexistence of all the small hidden things that whirled a family together—even if the family wasn’t a real one.

  “Um,” the boy began as he took a step toward them. This boy wasn’t some lost tourist—he had none of that blithe, entitled belonging. He looked at Marcela and Cello like they were stray dogs, with respect and care, but also with assured superiority. His head tilted, exposing a smooth, square jaw and glint of cheekbone that had been hidden beneath hair as long as a girl’s. Both Marcela and Cello followed the movement with the kind of attention reserved for dangerous things. This boy, whoever he was, was not like them.

  “Who the hell are you?” Marcela said. “What are you doing back here?” The three of them moved slowly, swirling like sluggish, muddy water around rocks in a river.

  “Um,” the boy said. “What are you doing back here?” There was a hint of a smile in this voice, an unsophisticated attempt to smooth them back, Cello noted.

  “We live here, asshole,” Marcela answered.

  The boy was incredulous. “Really? You live here?” He looked around the immediate surroundings, as though searching for a hidden door in a scooped-out hillside. “Where?”

  “That’s none of your business. Who are you?” Cello said as he squinted at the stranger, searching for some familiar Joseph feature. The boy’s face changed a few times, taken over by several different answers. He stepped forward, reaching out for a handshake.

  “I’m Ben,” he finally said. Marcela and Cello looked at his proffered hand and then at each other. Ben let his hand drop. They shifted a little, tightening the space between them.

  “You armed?” Cello asked.

  “What? No!” Ben fell back in alarm.

  Marcela and Cello shared another, this time relieved, look. Whatever he was, this stranger didn’t belong to the Josephs.

  “What’s this all about?” Cello asked, waving at the primitive screen of camouflage hanging around them. Ben moved toward his bike, but Marcela darted forward, tripping the stranger and pouncing on the bicycle. She righted it and got on, balancing her elbows on the handlebars. Her pleased little smile lifted Cello’s mood. There had been a bike at the garden once, a long time ago. All the bigger kids took turns riding it, but it had been left out in the weather and rusted into oblivion.

  “Listen, guys, I can just get out of your hair here,” said Ben, standing and brushing himself off.

  “I don’t think so,” Marcela said, glee plainly shimmering in her answer. “I think you’re going to tell us what you’re doing out here. And about your little campsite, or whatever this is.”

  “Trust me,” Cello said with a sympathetic shrug. “If you have something to explain about this setup, you should be real happy to be explaining it to us and not the others.” Cello sensed some sort of moneymaking scheme was at the heart of what was going on—the planting was too organized, making the most of the smallest amount of space. Whatever the boy was doing, it wasn’t something for his own, recreational enjoyment. Ben considered Marcela’s colonization of his bike, and looked suddenly devastated, as though he’d been given terrible news.

  Cello shook his head. “If Sil knew you been coming around here, he’d be doing a lot worse than running you off right now.”

  “He your dad?”

  Marcela and Cello looked at each other, their goofy smiles nearly identical. “Absolutely not,” Marcela said, her voice bright and wavering. It felt forbidden and thrilling, sharing this information with a stranger, Cello thought.

  “Well, if he’s a reasonable man, surely he can understand my predicament here.” Ben looked at them, from one to the other.

  “Well, he’s not. Reasonable. And you kept your predicament to yourself so far, so hard for anybody to understand it. But if you’re looking for understanding, you won’t get it from Sil. He won’t think twice about shooting for trespassing,” Cello said. He had started to enjoy the questioning, once he was sure that this boy knew nothing about them, nothing of their work at the garden, nothing of the missing baby.

  Cello watched the stranger’s decision surface around his eyes. “Well,” Ben began. “You guys ever heard of senging?”

  “Huh?” Marcela asked as she hopped on the bike properly and began to pedal a narrow trough through the tall grass.

  “Senging,” Ben repeated, looking after her, and the bike, with longing. “Picking ginseng.”

  “No,” Cello answered. “Never.”

  “Well.” Ben put a hand to his throat as though feeling for his pulse. “Some people pay for it, for wild ginseng. Mostly buyers from China.”

  “What?” Marcela said, flying past the two boys on another lap.

  “You find it in the woods—it likes the shade?” He motioned to the homemade canopy. “Has to be organic to get the best price. I found this little patch growing here, and thought I’d take care of it. Keep an eye on it until it’s ready to pick.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing here?” Cello said. “Stealing our wild ginseng?”

  Ben flinched at the mention of theft. “Look,” he said. “I had no idea this was your property.”

  “Obviously,” Marcela said. Tiring of the bike, she stopped beside Cello.

  “No, I mean, I thought this land was abandoned or something.” Cello saw the sincerity in the other boy’s face and sucked his teeth against the insides of his mouth, hoping he looked menacing.

  “Man, this kid is an idiot,” Marcela said gaily. “Look,” she continued, this time directly to Ben. “If you just give us what you made off
what wasn’t yours, we’ll let you go.” Her suggestion was underscored with an imperious pointing, a gesture so like Letta’s that it made Cello shiver.

  “No, no, no,” Ben said, waving his hands like he was trying to clear away what Marcela had said. “I mean, I’m sorry and everything, but you can’t hold it against me. I didn’t know!”

  “Offer us something else, then,” Marcela said with half a shrug.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Ben stammered, turning his back to them. “I mean, it’s usually too early to sell now, but I know a guy who buys it year-round.” He turned around, looking at them with what looked like an entirely different face—a face swarming with insincere charm. “We could do, like, a group project. We can all go looking for it and triple the profit.”

  “A group project? What the hell is that?” Marcela said.

  Cello crossed his arms in front of his chest. “How much did you get already?” he asked, thinking of that envelope buried behind the Stuckey’s.

  “Nothing,” Ben said. “Really, nothing!” He repeated this for Marcela’s benefit. Cello could feel the icy glare she was aiming at Ben. “We’ll start off on the right foot and everything. Teamwork, you know?”

  Cello and Marcela looked at one another, considering the measure of this unusual boy.

  “We might consider giving it a try. But we’re going to need some goodwill. From you,” Marcela said.

  “Like how?” Ben asked.

  “You think we’re soft in the head?” Marcela continued. Her voice was cool and even, and, Cello thought, absurdly confident. “You give us a nice bonus for using our property, and then we’re starting on the right foot.”

  Ben put his hands in his pockets and rolled his shoulders. “Fine.” Cello noticed the resignation in Ben’s face. “I don’t have it now, though.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Marcela rolled her eyes. “I guess we’ll just have to tell on you, then.”

  “No, I mean, let’s meet up here tomorrow morning, okay?”

  “You’ve got until seven a.m.,” Marcela said with an irritated little wobble across her brow. “You don’t come back with our money by then, we’ll take up all of what you spent so much time watching here, and find somewhere to sell it ourselves.”

  “Fine,” Ben said. They waited him out, staring as he retrieved the bike and sped away.

  “Wow, Marcela, you were great,” Cello said. “Maybe Letta should have you do all the talking next time we go out to the Josephs’.”

  “That’s hilarious,” Marcela said, reining in a beaming smile. “But it looks like you got a way to make that money you need.”

  14

  Joanie watched Cello and Marcela leave early in the morning, their whispers bouncing like moths against the trailer walls. She squirmed away from them and curled her body around the crescent of empty space where her baby sometimes slept. Cello’s goodness had once been reassuring and familiar—growing up, she’d felt it spill over onto her every now and then with a kind of celebratory affection. But his naive optimism wouldn’t erode any of her problems now. Joanie shut her eyes and allowed herself to be sad about that, too, just for a minute. Her missing son, her broken body. Growing her energy was her singular focus now.

  Marcela and Cello tried not to slam the door, though Joanie could hear that Sabina was already awake. The new duo was gone again, on some other hopeless adventure. Joanie wondered if her sister’s shifting alliances hurt Sabina. Joanie tried to imagine the wound, that separation, an unexpected bright flash, and was nearly knocked breathless with the force of it. Her emotional link with Sabina was a natural, lingering effect of setting up the worship together, that was all. She chased away the thought that it might be something bigger with the sweep of a hand over her hair. She pressed the empty spot on the mattress beside her, and thought about going out to the chapel again.

  She considered the shape of the worship she’d learned at Mother Joseph’s. It was nothing like worship on TV, those waves of pressed, sweating people, dripping with lace, heaving as one under the glass bell of a massive church far away, nor that soft, child’s lisping begging for a small and simple thing. The worship she’d been taught at the Josephs’ was different, bigger than the Work Letta taught her, and she was pulled—maybe pushed—toward the plausible conclusion that there was some other, bigger form of worship that the Josephs hadn’t worked out yet. A form that only she was meant to discover.

  * * *

  Joanie remembered the first time she’d been taken down. It was in that brief but electrifying period where Mother Joseph had come to trust her—or, if not exactly trust, to treat her as a creature of value. They filed down the groaning steps, Mother Joseph first, then old Harlan, and finally Josiah, who led her into the cellar with sweating hands. In the basement of the main house there was a secret place. An arched opening that yawned from under and behind the stairs, itself like the wide jaws of a serpent. It smelled different from the rest of the house, verdant but also dusty. Mother Joseph switched on an old floor lamp with a singed yellow shade, the cord trailing like a rodent’s tail to an outlet in the basement proper.

  Joanie squinted against the strange, dusty light, at the walls filled with woven thatch coverings. The scent of the room was familiar, because the coverings were desiccated stems from the Vine. Joanie wondered who had woven the elaborate, quilt-like patterns around them. She was certain it hadn’t been Mother Joseph.

  “You remember coming to this chapel?” Mother Joseph asked, fanning herself in the room’s heat. Joanie shook her head and pressed a hand against the wall. It was the first comforting texture she’d felt in her new home, like the rasp of one of the old chestnut trees at the garden. “We brought each of you down here, me and Letta, once we got you. For your baptisms. You,” she said, pointing between Joanie’s eyes, “were a trade. From one of the tenants.”

  Joanie tilted her head back, like she was swallowing medicine. The reality of her origins hit her with the force of a slap. When she was very little she wondered about her parents. In the privacy of her mind, she employed them in ridiculous, rococo ways—they were dentists, or witches, or hairdressers. They were always beautiful, incandescent as shampoo ads. Nothing could be further from what she’d imagined than those apparitions that stalked the gate. If there was any consolation, it was that no parent of Joanie’s could possibly still be alive, so miserable and doomed were those bodies she tried not to see as she walked to her work in the smokehouse.

  “You were only two, I think. Look, that’s you over there, on that side.” Mother Joseph leaned against the wall she was closest to, and nodded in the opposite direction. Joanie moved to where her mother-in-law’s chin pointed, to nearly a dozen ghostly chalk outlines of miniature bodies. The figures were cartoonish—like an iced gingerbread man parade along the wall. She counted the outlines and wondered where the rest of the traced children were.

  “Which one is me?”

  “Should say on there,” Harlan said. The thought of Harlan’s hands on her infant body locked up Joanie’s throat.

  “This one,” Josiah said, tapping at one of the figures.

  “Don’t touch it,” Joanie snapped, pulling his hand away.

  Mother Joseph produced a laugh that transformed into a phlegm-riddled cough. “Nice to see you got the right attitude. This is where we worship. Took a while to come around to it myself, but my great-grandmama started these traditions, and say what you want—it works,” she said. “And now you’re one of us, I expect you to worship here, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Joanie asked.

  “Well, you don’t get something for nothing. It’s up to you to come down here and pay the price,” Harlan said, leering.

  “You’ll be expected to do some Work down here, like all the women in our family have done over the years,” Mother Joseph said.

  “Don’t worry,” Josiah whispered, giving her arm a clammy sq
ueeze. Mother Joseph lifted her lime-green housedress up to her waist. Joanie, stunned, tried to brace herself for whatever was coming. She imagined the very worst; her mother-in-law wobbling out of her clothes—all of them—enormous, drooping breasts, wiry gray hair squashed in a matted nest at her crotch and ringing her withered nipples. Joanie averted her eyes from Mother Joseph’s varicose-veined legs, and covered her mouth, as though breathing in the old woman’s exposure was dangerous. Joanie tried not to imagine what horrible thing would come next.

  She heard the slap of palm on flesh and winced. Mother Joseph had dropped her dress back down and let loose a corrosive tumult of laughter. “You should’ve seen your face,” the old woman said, leaning against Harlan. “You see that, Harlan? Thought we lost her there for a minute.” Mother Joseph seemed off—a little vacant, as though not quite fully in her own, powerful body.

  Harlan nodded, his expression stippled with distinct, animal lewdness. Joanie wanted to scratch at them both, wanted to call the blood up from their swollen cheeks and sagging throats. She sauntered up toward that feeling, cool and slow, restoring herself as best she could.

  “We don’t have all day down here,” Mother Joseph snapped at Josiah. He moved past Joanie, flashing her a bloated, apologetic look.

  Joanie bit down on the insides of her cheeks and stared evenly at Harlan and Mother Joseph, who closely watched Josiah fossicking in a small cabinet behind her. She resisted the urge to turn and watch him, too. The feeling that Mother Joseph and Harlan planned to pounce on her, overtaken by some deranged whim, was too strong. There was a strange feeling twinkling in the air around all of them. Joanie watched them closely, prepared to fight.

  “Here,” Josiah said as he nudged a navy blue box of salt into her hand. “You just spread it over the floor.” He waved his arms around the space, his shaking hands little smudgy blurs of flesh.

  Mother Joseph made a sound in her throat. It startled Josiah and he dropped his arms to his sides with an exaggerated slap. “As usual, son, you haven’t made a drop of sense. Give her the book, Harlan.” Mother Joseph shifted the bulk of her body from foot to foot, swaying with impatience. Harlan disappeared and quickly returned with a stack of notebooks held together by a crumbling leather belt. Joanie lifted it into her hands—it was still warm from the heat lamp over the serpent’s tank.