Strange Folk, page 1
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For Mama
PROLOGUE
The girl watched from the blackberry bush as the cabin glowed in the falling darkness.
The windows radiated warm voices and the smell of chicken and dumplings. Her belly churned. She hadn’t eaten or uttered a word in days.
A dark-haired woman led a small group out of the cabin into the backyard, where a fire blazed. As they gathered around the flames, the woman pulled out a large canning jar filled with a gray powder, and a black leather book.
The girl’s breath quickened, and she held it. She was only ten or so feet away, hidden at the dense edge of the woods. They would hear if she made a sound.
The woman took off her shoes and stood in a wide, powerful stance with her bare feet planted firmly in the ground. Her voice was hard and potent as she addressed the group, and the girl leaned in to listen from the shadows. Her pulse skipped when she heard why they had gathered. A secret unfurled inside her like a daddy longlegs stretching its limbs.
The woman started to hum with a strange voice that buzzed in the girl’s chest. The others joined in harmony, growing louder, and the buzz spread, vibrating through every inch of the girl’s body.
The woman violently shook the jar and passed it to the next person, who repeated the motion. She picked up the black book, and as she read out the words, the wind surged and the clouds rolled in front of the moon so that there was only the fire to illuminate them. The girl was left in thick, solitary darkness at the outer edge.
The woman put the jar into a hole in the ground and buried it with fistfuls of dirt. Then she took out a knife and ran it across her hand, and the girl could feel a phantom sear in her own. She watched as the woman squeezed her palm over the dirt mound and blood trickled down into it.
The woman’s speech became a fierce chant, and the others joined in again, flinging the words into the fire so that it jerked and smoked.
Eventually their voices began to slow, and then the hum finally died with one resounding amen that the girl whispered to herself. The others fell back into the dirt, laughing maniacally with sweat glistening on their faces.
That was when the girl saw it. A shadow lurking just outside the circle. No one seemed to notice, except for the dark-haired woman, who stared at the shadow, transfixed.
It moved through the circle amidst their giddy, sprawled bodies, but they still did not see it. The girl watched each shiver as it passed. Even from her hiding place, she could feel its chill seeping into her bones.
At the edge of the clearing, the shadow turned back to look at the woman.
Then it disappeared into the dark.
ONE
LEE
It was quiet in the car when the road began to climb into the mountains. In the front seat, Meredith’s head rested against the seat belt in a sling. Cliff was hunched on his side, making a contorted bed out of the backseat. Lee’s mouth tasted like fermented pennies from the coffee she’d gotten in Arkansas early that morning.
As the incline of the highway steepened, a chill crept in through the vents, and the air turned to mist around the car. Lee pressed the back of her hand to the window. It was freezing.
Soon the fog was so thick that she was forced to turn on her headlights and slow to a crawl, hugging the innermost lane to avoid the edge. She wound slowly through the twists of the road and passed large semi-trucks barely creeping along the pavement. Her hands were slick and tightly gripped on the steering wheel, and her foot shook a little on the gas. One swift movement, and she and her children would go careening off the edge.
They were on hour thirty-four of a three-day trek from California, and she was starting to lose it. Only a few more hours to go. She tried to put a podcast on, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her mind wandered back to the last time she’d been home.
Twenty years ago, she’d been heading in the opposite direction on a bus bound for college, looking out the window at the fog-cloaked valley erasing in front of her and replaying her last moments with Mama outside the bus station. Mama was two months sober and still a little bit beautiful, but Lee could see the cracks forming. She was on the verge of collapse; as soon as Lee was no longer there to watch her, she would fall apart.
At the driver’s final call, Mama hugged her suddenly, violently, with ash and gardenia filling Lee’s nose. Then she put her lips to Lee’s ear and whispered, “If you ever come back here, Opaline, I will skin you alive.”
College had not been what Lee expected. Her goal had been only escape, and it had taken every ounce of her to do it. She’d denounced everything she’d known, including her own name. But then she wondered, What now? She didn’t know how to make friends, didn’t know how to approach people and make herself open to them. She had the kind of weirdness that sealed her off from people. A strangeness.
She was adrift until she met Cooper with his shaggy blond hair and disheveled Bohemian style that belied his money. He claimed to like her strangeness, but after years of him trying to sand down her edges and of her contorting herself to fit his rich, shiny world, she had lost sight of who she was or where she belonged. She was a mother, and she loved that. But beneath it, she had devolved into something she recognized too well. There was a deep wrongness inside of her that she hadn’t escaped.
Lee hadn’t planned on ever coming back to Craw Valley. And yet, here she was, running away from a failed marriage and an empty life. Returning to this place because she had nowhere else to go.
The car began to angle downward, and the thick fog receded. In the clear air, the valley revealed itself as a wet, green, sprawling country that became blue mountains in the distance. Lee opened her window and inhaled the sweet chill, her desert-dried skin reanimating with the moisture and her mind clearing of her failures for a brief moment.
She looked out over the mountains and could feel their pull even from here, reeling her in.
At the rush of air, Meredith yawned and sat up, and Cliff stretched in her rearview mirror.
“I dreamt we were in the forest and there was a fire,” her son shared sleepily. “Like we were camping, but not. It was me, you, and a bunch of strangers standing around it. You were saying something in this scary voice, and there was this buzzing like a bug in my ear. It was really weird.”
Unease slithered down Lee’s spine. “Creepy, Iff.”
“What about me? Was I there?” Meredith asked.
“No. Just me and Mom.”
“That’s messed up.” Meredith reached into the backseat and swatted his leg. “So what happened next?”
“I don’t know. Mom rolled down the window and woke me up.”
“I had to. Look at this. Smell it.” She gestured out the window at the landscape and inhaled dramatically.
“I think you have car fever,” Meredith said.
Cliff kicked Meredith’s seat and shrieked, “I’ve got the fever, too!”
Lee lowered the other windows, and their hair started whipping around their heads. Cliff laughed, and Meredith reluctantly gave up a smile.
“Are you ready?” Lee yelled at them through the thumping current.
They both answered, “Yes!”
“As hard as you can, okay?”
She counted to three, and they leaned their heads out the windows and screamed over the mountains as hard as they could. In Lee’s howl was the force of all her anxieties and regrets and love, announcing herself to this godforsaken place.
* * *
An hour later, Lee took the familiar exit. She marveled at the cluster of new chain restaurants, the freshly stuccoed Walmart, the dead-stock retailers with parking lots packed to the gills.
As she moved farther away from the highway, the country took over and the strip malls became the thick woods and empty fields she recognized. A string of local businesses sprouted up amidst the green of the pine and the hickory and maple turning gold and crimson—a hamburger stand, a tractor supply, a new Mexican place where the Italian joint had been.
She felt herself entering a familiar groove. A part of her brain that she had tried to repurpose for anything else was now awakening at the scenery she’d passed thousands of times as a child, imprinted on her like a second language. There was the red-and-yellow sign for Hardee’s where she had waited for Mama in the hash-brown fumes when she forgot to pick her up. And the small brick façade of the public library where she’d slept the nights Mama had people over who tried to climb into Lee’s bed.
A tender pain bubbled up in her chest, and she quickly buried it. She wanted to see the place through new eyes, as an outsider.
“So, is this it? Are we here?” Meredith asked.
“Yep. This is it. The great town of Craw Valley.” Her children were quiet as they scanned out the windows. “Don’t worry. Six months max, remember? Probably less. Enough time for your dad and I to work out an arrangement.” She knew it was ridiculous that she refused to say the word “divorce” to them, but the word was charged and made of a torturous metal when she saw it in her mind. This was not the childhood she’d wanted for them. At least arrangement held a tinge of enlightenment
“I think it’s kind of… cute.”
Lee glanced at Meredith, searching for one eyebrow arched in sarcasm. Her daughter approved of very few things anymore, and none of them were cute. But her face was earnest. “You think it’s cute.”
“I mean, it’s not trying to be something it’s not. It’s not trying so hard. Like, ‘look at me, look at who I am, buy things from me.’ ”
“I’ll give you that. It’s definitely not trying very hard. Iff, what do you think?”
“I kind of like it, too. It makes me think of something red and veined, like when you see an animal ear in the sun.”
Lee looked back out the window and marveled at how he was able to capture the world in such a strange and perfect way. “I know what you mean,” she agreed.
Cliff saw the world through a different filter; people and places evoked colors or specific images, and he often couldn’t distinguish between his imagination and reality. Sometimes he knew things he shouldn’t: little predictions for the future, undisclosed facts about people. She had expected it to go away as he got older, but the fantasies only strengthened as he moved closer to adolescence. He had been seen by many doctors and given many diagnoses at her husband’s insistence, but they never entirely fit.
They continued down a one-lane road and passed small, neat salt boxes and prefabricated ranch houses. One decaying wood house stood with an abandoned school bus parked out front and a cracked plastic pool piled in the side yard. And then there were no houses, only a narrow, winding road with a succession of dirt and gravel drives receding into a wall of trees on each side, closing them in. Lee felt safe under its canopy, no longer exposed to the sky and the elements as she’d been for the thousands of miles they’d streaked through flat, dry country.
Before she was aware of it, she spotted the crooked oak and hung a right onto a gravel road. Though her hybrid SUV was supposedly made for off-roading, she could hear scraping as she navigated each curve and dip. After a while, the trees gave way to a clearing with a modest cabin in its center, as if raised from the earth itself. Buckets and barrels sat around its perimeter, waiting for rain, and something copper-colored hung from the tree in front at a sinister angle. She parked in the dirt next to a pickup truck, and they emerged stiff-legged from the car.
Lee took a deep breath in. The air was pure rain-watered wetness, and it smelled of trees—the salted bark, the vegetable leaves, the oxygen fumes. She told herself she could appreciate this place like a tourist. No plans to stay long term. Just passing through to soak up the clean air and leer at the deciduous shedding their leaves in a riot of color.
A Black woman came out of the screened porch, and it took Lee a moment to place her. A friend of her mother’s, but only in the early years. She was wearing sensible, loose-fitting jeans, and her hair was combed back from a high-cheekboned face with no makeup. She pulled her hands out of her pockets and gestured at them in welcome.
“Hey, darlin’. Do you remember me? Luann?”
“Yes, I think I do. You were Mama’s friend.”
“Yeah, that’s right. It’s been a long time.” She reached out and shook her hand with both palms wrapped around Lee’s. “Belva’s out back.”
“Sounds good.”
Cliff held on to Meredith’s sleeve as they warily approached from the other side of the car. They weren’t very high on strangers.
“Meredith and Cliff, this is Luann. A friend of the family.”
They nodded in greeting, and Meredith pointed to the thing hanging in the tree. “What’s that?”
“Oh, yes. We been light on rain for the past week, so Belva split a snake down its middle and hung it in the tree there. Got a good sprinkling this morning before y’all arrived.”
Meredith’s eyes widened, and Cliff huddled closer to her. Luann took her cue. “You must be tired after your trip. Y’all come on in.”
They followed Luann through the porch and then the front door, still painted blue with old iron tools hung above its frame.
The small wood-lined living room was the same as it had always been, with the orange polyester couch and the rag rug fraying at the edges. Carved birds sat perched on shelves looking down at them. The old money jar stood by the door filled with coins and labeled MYRTLE BEACH in faded marker. Lee wondered if Belva ever made it to the ocean.
The most pronounced change was a spread of picture frames on the east wall. As Lee moved closer, she realized it was every Christmas card she’d ever sent. Fifteen photos of Lee and her family in sweaters, lined up in black plastic Walmart frames. It broke her heart a little bit, this preservation of the type of card that people usually threw away when January came around. This grasping at some connection to the granddaughter who had neglected their relationship for decades. She wondered if Belva understood that it had never been about her. It was about this place, and this life. It was hard to hold on to a piece of it when she’d intended to leave it wholly behind.
Before she could dwell on it further, she noticed a hulking man in a worn flannel standing at the counter in the kitchen. He was covering steaks in a marinade with large callused hands studded with thyme flowers, and when he looked up, his eyes sparkled with mirth.
“Shit dog, it’s Opaline.” As he came around to hug Lee with hands pointed up to protect her shirt, Meredith shot her a look and mouthed Opaline?
“Uncle Billy! I’m actually going by ‘Lee’ now.”
“Oh, right, I knew that. I seen the Christmas cards.”
Lee’s shame was renewed at the mention of them. “I didn’t know you’d be here. How are you?”
Billy sighed. “Same old, same old. I couldn’t miss meeting the famous Meredith and Cliff.” He bent his large frame toward the kids. “Meredith, I’m Billy. I’m sure your mama’s never talked about me, so I’ll save you the trouble and tell you I’m Redbud’s crazy little brother.” He eyed the paperback sticking out of her bag. “So you’re a reader, huh? What you reading right now?”
Meredith shot Lee another look as if to say Redbud? “Oh. Um. I guess I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin.”
“I don’t know her. What does she write?”
“Sci-fi fantasy. She’s one of the most important writers in that genre.”
Billy whistled. “Can I borrow one? Damn shame I never heard of her.”
Meredith visibly softened. “Yeah, sure. I only found out about her on Reddit. It’s, like, a crime no one talks about her.”
Billy pivoted toward Cliff and studied him for a little bit before asking, “What do you make of this place?”
Cliff’s eyes scanned the walls and the people around him with an intent gaze. Lee expected Cliff to shy away from Billy, but he seemed drawn to him. His voice was dreamy as he said, “There are so many colors here.”
Billy nodded. “What’s my color?”
“You’re sorta orangey gold. Like those flowers outside. With the tiny petals.”
“Marigold.”
“Yeah, like that.”
Billy smiled. “This is a special place. Not much like it except for my cabin a little ways down the road. Y’all should come over sometime. I got a mess of animals and other stuff I can show you.”
Cliff glittered at the mention of it.
Billy turned back to the steaks and sprinkled salt on them. “Hope y’all like venison.”
Meredith and Cliff looked at Lee incredulously.
“Venison is deer, guys.”
They both went a little wide-eyed, and Billy guffawed up to the ceiling.
In the silence of her children, Billy kept jabbering on, but Lee couldn’t hear him. A vibration was building in the air, and Lee was the only one who could feel it, pulling her toward the back of the house.
She left the kids in the kitchen and traced a path down the hallway. On a side table covered in white lace sat a few framed photographs with candles, a gold necklace, and a packet of chewing tobacco in front of them. One photo was an old glamour shot of an auburn-haired woman with intense, nervous eyes and a red feather boa wrapped dissonantly around her shoulders. It had been so long since she’d seen her aunt Ruby Jo that she had a hard time recognizing her at first. She died when Lee was still in elementary school. Next to her frame was a senior portrait of a fluffy-haired white boy with the grainy overexposure of the early 2000s. It was Ruby Jo’s son, her cousin Earl. Lee remembered when her mother called her in the middle of the night years ago. Her words had dissolved in her mouth as she raved, drunk or high or both, about Earl dying in a motorcycle accident. It wasn’t until Lee had looked it up online that she learned he’d been running from the police after a drug bust.
