Wildwood magic, p.19
Wildwood Magic, page 19
Adam had big plans. More and more he was supposing that Thomas wasn’t going to fit in with them. He and he alone would be Reverend Gray’s right-hand man. More than that, he would be responsible for the beginning of the Sect commune the prophet had preached about establishing in Morgan’s Gap. Adam had the land. He’d inherited a large parcel of mountainside when his father died. He’d be hailed as a Savior himself if he offered it to the Sect.
When the time was right, he’d walk up during an altar call and he’d declare his intention.
They’d followed the heathen woman from the orchard to the junkyard just outside of town. It was an isolated place hidden away from neighbors and prying eyes and it held all sorts of possibilities. That hulk of a handyman stopped by the orchard nearly every day. Sometimes he wouldn’t drive all the way to the house. Instead, he would circle the drive as if he was a sheriff on patrol.
Reverend Gray had been very clear on how wayward women should be handled and Adam figured he and Thomas would be able to dish out a few lessons to the old bitch who brazenly rode around with a motorcycle clamped between her thighs at the same time as the woman who had ordered them off her property. He thought maybe they’d even catch the women in the middle of unspeakable acts that the sordid recesses of his brain spelled out in Technicolor whenever he closed his eyes.
He’d practically had to drag Thomas away from the car and his comb. They’d crept through a graveyard of abandoned vehicles, fighting through an overgrown tangle of briars and vines that caught and held tight to pants, shirts and skin. Thomas had whined and complained with every prick and scratch, but Adam doggedly ignored the blood that oozed from his own torn skin. Up ahead would be glorious compensation worthy of Ezekiel Gray’s right-hand man.
The sculpture was surprisingly light considering it was life-sized, but it was entirely hollow save for the fluttering aluminum hearts. Jo instructed me to take up one side while she lifted the other and we carried it back to where I’d parked my car. The trunk was empty now that I’d delivered the scrap and I figured the deer would fit although I was pretty certain we’d have to leave the lid open.
“I have some rope we can use to keep the trunk from flapping and so you can see in your rearview mirror,” Jo offered after we’d situated the sculpture in place.
“The orchard isn’t far,” I murmured, whether to reassure myself, Jo or the now inanimate mother and child… I wasn’t sure. The wind couldn’t reach the sculpture’s aluminum hearts and I didn’t like their sudden stillness. I’d be glad to get them out and set up in Honeywick’s yard.
Jo vanished in search of rope inside the organized chaos of her workshop and I waited, kept company by the clicks, whirs and jinglejangle of all the other sculptures that were still out in the breeze. I’d thought it was cheery when I’d arrived, but with no one else around the movement became eerie.
The creak-creak-creak of a child-sized rusty stick figure on a swing hanging from a scraggly oak tree sent skittering spider legs up my spine. The on-and-off breeze made it sporadic and discordant.
I rubbed the goose bumps that had sprung up on my arms and looked around. The encroaching wildwood made the animals in Jo’s collection look lifelike, a metallic menagerie surrounding me, staring from every direction while vines, brambles and reaching limbs of bush and tree sought to reclaim the sculptures with twists and tendrils and roots climbing up from the ground.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to rust.
Maybe Jo was taking the most unnatural of materials and giving them back to nature once more. A sort of offering. I thought about how churches were often filled with sculptures. Of saints and angels. Of disciples and deities.
The breeze died.
The junkyard fell silent.
I held my breath, waiting for what, I didn’t know—another gust of wind in the leaves, the continuation of the sculptures’ strange song, a whisper, a sigh—until the pent-up air in my lungs exploded in a shaky exhalation that sounded weak in the stillness.
Something was wrong.
The hair on the back of my neck rose and I strained to see into the trees. There were too many shadows. Too many mysteriously overgrown pieces of junk that eerily resembled faces and figures between bushes and brambles and vines.
I froze, feeling akin to the deer sculpture with my head up, scenting the air as if to protect the fawn attached to its side.
Suddenly, a shadow shifted and detached itself from the undergrowth. Something stepped from the trees to swish through patches of tall grass toward me. A tawny speckled bobcat padded from one oasis of grass to another. Its ears perked toward me. Its eyes flashed in beams of sunlight. Appearing and disappearing in the greenery like a muscled mirage.
Swish-swish-swish.
The hushed sound of the approaching wildcat had replaced the sound of the creaking swing, but I wasn’t creeped out anymore. The gooseflesh on my arms had another cause—reverence, and awe.
Jo’s junkyard suddenly felt peaceful again, for all the world like a chapel. And the bobcat might as well have been in robes.
Eve had fallen back asleep on my arm. Now she tightened and raised her head. She swayed to and fro as if she heard a song I couldn’t hear. Just as she had when we’d heard the whip-poor-will at Truvy’s place.
I didn’t say “Truvy’s” whip-poor-will. I never called Eve mine either. I didn’t own the bright green snake. Granny didn’t own the weasel. They were our companions. And Granny had said the wildwood communicated with us through our companions.
As I watched the bobcat walk closer and closer to me, I could see its kinetic potential in the muscles of its back and haunches, in the curve of its neck and the twitch of its ears. Energy. Just like Jo’s sculptures. Just like Jo herself.
Something in me responded with energy of my own. Like calling to like. An awakening.
“Rachel, this is Axel. Axel, this is Rachel. You’ve heard of junkyard dogs. Well, Axel watches over this place… and me,” Jo said.
I’d known the bobcat was Jo’s companion almost at first sight. But it wasn’t until the introduction that I realized it was Axel’s appearance that had dispelled the feeling that I was being surrounded and watched. Jo’s place was unusual, but I liked it. Overall it had a good vibe. A breeze kicked up again while we tied off the trunk nice and tight, but the noise around us was joyful once more.
What had I been picking up on those moments alone before Axel had appeared?
Adam
By the time they got to the garage, they were both bleeding and breathless and Adam’s enthusiasm had dimmed.
For one thing, the junkyard turned into a carnival freak show the closer they came to where they could hear the women talking. Monkeys made of bicycle rims spun at them from the trees. Spiky spiders welded from pipes scurried and snakes made from hoses hissed in the wind.
But it was the unnaturally large bobcat that made him grab Thomas’s arm and pull him back the way they had come.
The junkyard didn’t have possibility after all.
Better to wait until he was sure they had the bitch all alone at the orchard. It was farther from town. All they had to do was make sure the big tinker was kept busy elsewhere. All he needed was some uninterrupted time alone with the type of woman Reverend Gray said consorted with the devil. He’d gotten in trouble before for being too rough with his girlfriends. But there wasn’t anything too rough for Satan’s bride, was there?
Not anything at all.
Seventeen
Siobhán
Morgan’s Gap, 1883
She was pregnant. Overseeing construction of the new railroad had frequently taken The Morgan away and she’d often gone to stay with Harry. Too often. People began to whisper behind her back, then, more boldly, even when she was around. When she began to throw up in the mornings, her maid responded with pursed lips and sly knowing eyes.
The Morgan had given up on having an heir with her. Rumor had it that he was trying with multiple girls around town, planning to set aside Siobhán and marry the one who could give him a child. Siobhán suspected no one could give The Morgan a child. Not the first wife he’d murdered. Not her. Not any number of other girls, willing or not for his crude, violent advances. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have claimed him as the father of the beekeeper’s child. She wouldn’t sully their beautiful wildwood-blessed union with such a lie.
The apple trees she’d planted had flourished. They now stood as tall as if they’d been growing for ten years. Their thriving proved the blessing. And the honeybees. The bees had produced so much honey this spring that Harry had sent a cartload to a brewer. He’d promised the settlement—now officially a town named Morgan’s Gap—honey mead for autumn, lush and sweet.
But all Siobhán could think of was the babe in her womb.
The Morgan would kill the beekeeper when he found out. As much out of envy that she had another lover as jealousy because he could not sire a child. Of that she was certain. But what of the baby? Would he want to take it for his own or would he seek to kill it too, the evidence of her fruitfulness and his failure?
She had to protect Harry, the baby and herself.
Once her stomach had settled, Siobhán began to pack. She wouldn’t take any of the dresses The Morgan had forced her to wear. She packed the old clothes she’d brought from Ireland. The petticoat with its ragged, untacked hem, now empty. Her skirts that were barely fit for a lady’s maid. The wooden chest carved with swooping swallows, and in it the few coins she hadn’t spent. She would flee to the orchard and pray that the wildwood would protect the baby.
“You dare to pack while I am gone,” a voice sneered from the doorway.
Before she turned around to face her husband, Siobhán knew the sly maid must be one of the girls The Morgan was bedding. She had rushed to tell him about the morning sickness, evidence of his wife’s betrayal.
“Let me go, you dinna want me,” Siobhán said. Her voice shook like it hadn’t before she had more than herself to worry about. How many times had she risen from abuse to wash and get on with her life, such that it was, battered but not broken. Trapped but not without hope.
“I want what is mine, and you are mine until death do us part. Or did ya forget promises made?” The Morgan said. He was huge in the doorway. Too big to get around even if she was fast enough to avoid his fists. Those he had placed, clenched, against the frame of the door. His knuckles white as he pressed his weight and might into the wood.
“You’ll kill me, then?” Siobhán challenged. The house was filled with his servants, but not all of them were bad. Some were God fearing. Some weren’t unkind. Would they ignore her if she began to scream?
“You are a whore. A murderous whore. Who will blame me if I rid the town of ya?” The Morgan asked. He stepped into the room, maybe having rationalized to himself how he would excuse her death at his hands. Any excuse would do. The town was his. The world was his. A wife’s life held no value on its own.
But the wildwood wasn’t his.
Later, many folk in Morgan’s Gap would swear that they felt the earth shake, that they heard the distant rumble of the mine collapse.
Siobhán sensed it in a different way. Never-ending spirals of infinite roots came to life beneath the earth of the mountain in defense of her and her unborn child, and the hand-cranked sirens began to scream.
Eighteen
The tiny creek that meandered through the farm had slowed to a trickle before Mary disappeared. Now, in July, after weeks of no rain, it was nothing but a dry trail of polished stones broken occasionally by meager puddles. Desperate tadpoles squiggled like oil slicks from pool to pool to survive. In order to keep the nanny goats and chickens watered, I had to carry water twice a day, morning and night, to fill the long, low watering trough in the barnyard. I rose early each morning to try to beat the heat, but as I carried water from the rapidly diminishing pond at the spring house, I dripped with perspiration. I’d made extra trips to try to save some of the pollywogs, and my back and shoulders screamed even as the goats and chickens moved in slow motion to take advantage of a fresh morning drink.
Even with water and plenty of shade available for them in the barn, the heat made the goats sluggish and the chickens irritable. Dust rose around us, stirred beneath cloven hooves on the bare patches that were spreading inexorably, day by day, throughout the yard. I coughed as I hooked the empty buckets on the useless pump beside the wooden trough, already dreading the same chore come evening. The pump hadn’t worked since I’d come to the farm. Mary had let the animals drink from the burbling creek when it was still flowing.
The pleasure of the goats as they slurped eased the pain in my shoulders.
The flutter of the aluminum hearts in Jo’s deer, which I’d placed by the front of the cottage, cheered me.
I’d thought about asking Mack to take a look at the pump to see if it could be fixed. I really had, but there were other, less logical things I wished when it came to the tinker, and it was those things that kept me hauling water in buckets from a pond that mocked me with its gradually shrinking reservoir.
After I’d watered and fed the goats and chickens, I went inside and showered and changed. Luckily, the well that supplied the house with water was fine.
The one place in town I could probably go without worrying about bumping into Ezekiel or any of his followers was the library. I should have been used to driving by the Sect tent by now, but there always seemed to be something to shake me.
A lean-to booth of board and tin had been set up for refreshments with half a dozen picnic tables to the side. And an outhouse had been constructed on a slight rise behind the booth.
The town looked different after I’d seen the evidence of Ezekiel’s popularity and his intention to linger. As if its Monday morning sleepiness was a façade. I had to remind myself that there were probably plenty of people who would never step foot in Ezekiel’s tent or who would walk out once they heard what he had to say. It was only the heat and my personal experience with the Sect that made me suspect monsters behind every store front or picket fence.
The very idea of hate spreading from town to claim the wildwood of Sugarloaf Mountain made a cold knot form in the pit of my stomach. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. But the threat of it loomed over all the new friends I’d made.
By the time I arrived at the library, I was happy to lose myself in the stacks for a while.
I didn’t visit the library often and I never visited on the same day as children’s story hour, although I always lingered over bulletin board displays to search for Pearl’s photograph. Helen Newbill had started bringing her adopted daughter before she could walk.
A good mom. A great mom. The best. There were plenty of good people in Morgan’s Gap to offset hardship and the desperation it could cause in a community. Mary, Helen, Mack. Truvy, Jo, Mavis. Even Granny Ross. Witch? Possibly. But a good woman nonetheless.
Love of reading had saved me from the dark clutches of fanaticism and ignorance. Pearl had a better life than I had had, but I still wanted her to have a bigger life than she would have without opening herself to a world of ideas and stories and knowledge from outside her own sphere.
I had devoured everything on Mary’s shelves while I was pregnant. From Malcolm X to E. B. White. But even Mary’s extensive hoard couldn’t keep up with me.
At the library I’d found so much my childhood had denied me.
What would the “good” sisters have thought of Agatha Christie? Considering I’d been beaten for a tiny truncated version of The Scarlet Letter, I thought not much. Each week, I chose a book from each section—mystery, science fiction, biography and history. A year into my enjoyment I started to understand why Mary had kept her own library of sorts—the library in Morgan’s Gap was censored. There were books on women’s suffrage but no books on the more current movement for equality. No Gloria Steinem. No Sylvia Plath. There were books about the Civil War, but none about civil rights. And certainly none by Gwendolyn Brooks or Ann Petry.
The Sect had tried to completely shut down my curiosity, but I thought censorship might be worse. Did the people who used the Morgan’s Gap library know their reading materials were being curated in order to moderate their exposure to the changes happening in the wider world beyond the mountain? Cozy and quaint could be nice, but isolationism was dangerous. In many ways, the women and children in Morgan’s Gap were being as kept and contained as the women and children in the Sect. And the men who had control of what the library allowed on its shelves? Were they very different from the men of the Sect?
Something told me they were the type of people who had been partly responsible for the worn-down grass around the revival tent.
I could have looked up the town’s history, but I had grown too close to Siobhán. I was afraid of what I might discover. Real fear, as if I was the one who loved the beekeeper and longed for a future with him and our child, had settled deep in me, a hot knot of dread in my gut. It echoed my current fear of Ezekiel and his followers finding out about Pearl. It seemed impossible that Siobhán had managed a happily ever after once The Morgan confronted her about the affair. Had she survived? Had the beekeeper? Had their baby thrived? I needed to believe they had. I needed to believe Pearl could. Even if I would never be able to myself.
I had picked my selections for the day and I was headed for the counter with my card when I saw Mrs. Long, the librarian, taking down a current issue of a news magazine. The cover featured a group of teenagers at a music festival.
“May I check out that magazine?” I asked.
“We’ve had some complaints this morning. About the cover. I was told to take it out of circulation,” she said.
“Are you going to throw it away? May I have it instead?” I asked.
I didn’t have to ask why someone had complained. The long hair and peace signs would have been enough to draw complaints. I was afraid too that the man wearing a turban and playing a sitar at the edge of the frame would have been too much for a bigot to take. To me the photograph looked appealing. Young people from varied backgrounds coming together using music to connect, communicate and stand for human rights. Modern American music was a reflection of the world—its beauty, its injustices, its protests, its celebrations.
