Strange Folk, page 22
As the woman sprinkled St. John’s wort into the mush, a sharp crack came from the root cellar. She rushed to the hallway where her children stood hovering over the trapdoor. She told them to go to their room. She lifted the old wood by the iron handle and moved slowly down the ladder. Rotted eggs and dark, sweet strawberries filled her nose before she could make out anything in the dim. Her husband lay in a heap on the floor with a gun next to him. Most of his head was gone and two shades of red pooled around him. A dark, syrupy blood and the brighter red of strawberry jam dripped down from the shattered jars behind him. Fruit and flesh mixed in the puddle without distinction. As she was accustomed to do, she bypassed sorrow and filled with fury.
The cabin disappeared, and then there was something else. A campfire and fresh snow.
A man, woman, and child wrapped in thick blankets and furs hiked up a steep mountainside in light snow. The child stumbled, and the man pulled him onto his back. They came upon a cave carved out of the rock face and huddled inside. They smelled the smoke snaking up from the valley below and listened to the faint gunfire. The snow started to fall more thickly, and its steady pattern was hypnotic, lulling them to sleep as they leaned against one another for warmth with the child between them like their tiny beating heart. Hours later, the man came to. It was dark out and the temperature had plunged. He could see tiny icicles hanging from his eyelashes. When he stood to stretch his legs and warm his blood, the child slumped forward into the snow. The man put a hand on the child’s back to pull him up and recoiled. He was hard and cold like a block of ice. The woman woke and shook the boy and wrapped him against her skin inside her blanket, but the man knew it was no use. The man and the woman met blistered eyes across the cave, and their rage ignited.
And then there were more and more people.
Generations of pain surged through Lee like a stimulant bubbling through her veins, activating a vein of fury inside her she hadn’t felt in its full force since she was a teenager. A fury for her father’s drinking and his death, and her mother’s addiction and her loneliness, and the years of feeling trapped and freakish in her life with Cooper. It reached far beyond mere anger. It was the strangeness inside of her, her family’s strangeness, lit up and aflame. It unfurled her, and she felt herself rising up, buoyed by its power.
She heard someone gasp and a chill overtook her like a cold plunge. She felt her being sink back down to the earth. When she opened her eyes, she saw only dense, writhing black. The shadow from her mother’s memory stood looming a few inches from her face, and the breath left her body.
She felt a small circle of heat against her chest, and she realized it was Pallie’s locket. When the shadow reached out and tried to touch her, it stopped just short of her flesh, like there was a force field surrounding her.
In her periphery, she saw Redbud look up from her hands and stare at the thing, transfixed. She rose from her knees without breaking eye contact with the creature. She walked into the center, and the creature moved away from Lee and followed her, so that Redbud was now face-to-face with it. She brought her arm up, and it mimicked the movement with its smooth, inscrutable limb. She brought her other arm up, and it mimicked this gesture as well. She asked it what it wanted, and it only hovered there in silence.
All humming had ceased, and Lee suddenly felt bare. Vulnerable. This creature could do anything to them.
Lee tried to put her body between Redbud and the shadow again, but her mother gently pushed her aside. Lee could feel her mother’s fear attempting to undo her, and she realized they were all linked. She didn’t feel everyone with the same strength, but she could undeniably feel them. Billy’s tightly coiled readiness to attack, Luann’s grounding solidity, Kimmie’s sorrow-tinged defiance, Otis’s awe, Cliff’s small glittering soul. Through the act of the ritual, they’d become one.
Redbud held her ground. She put her hand up again, and the shadow mirrored it, but this time she pressed her hand forward. Her palm met its palm in the space between them, touching the boundary of its form.
The night dissolved around Lee and was replaced with sunshine.
Lee saw a young girl of about ten with Redbud’s sober, flashing eyes standing at the end of the gravel driveway, watching her grandma cross the road to the mailbox on the other side. When she was halfway across, a car came roaring around the bend and ran right through her grandma without stopping. The impact launched her into the air and brought her down hard against the asphalt. Redbud ran and crouched over her. There was blood running from both nostrils and her mouth was filled with it. Redbud looked at the car that had come to a screeching halt a few yards away. A wobbly high-heeled leg emerged from the car, and a head of disheveled curls and bleeding eye makeup turned to look at them before closing the door and speeding away. Redbud held her grandma in her tiny arms and rocked her in the middle of the road.
Then there was chaos swirling around her. Someone took her cold, stiff grandma away, and the sheriff appeared in front of her. Redbud told him it was the judge’s wife who’d done it. He frowned and told her she must have been mistaken.
Then Lee was back in the woods at night, but the faces that surrounded her were young girls in pajamas. Redbud stood confidently in a white nightgown with her hair unbraided and loose around her shoulders. It couldn’t be more than a few months later. Instead of a fire, small candles burned at the center, and each girl gripped a flashlight, some scared and others caught up in the game of it. Redbud held up an off-brand Barbie by both legs over her head. She spoke of the judge’s wife and her drunk driving that led to the death of her grandma. Then she took the doll by the torso and pulled her right leg forward. She snipped it off at the thigh with a pair of garden shears.
Then it was day, and Redbud was at the farmer’s market with Belva. She watched as a woman in nurse scrubs helped the judge’s wife out of the backseat of a car into a wheelchair. Her right leg hung lifelessly down. A woman whispered to Belva that she woke up one day and couldn’t feel her right leg. The doctors had tried everything, but nothing worked. Belva wondered why they hadn’t called her. Redbud made searing eye contact with the judge’s wife across the square, who shivered and turned away.
The scene changed again. Redbud strutted down the halls of the school with firm, purposeful steps. She rounded a corner and came upon a boy poking Ruby Jo in her thick, soft stomach and muttering in a low voice as she cowered against the wall in tears. Redbud let out a harsh, guttural “hey,” and the boy pulled his hand back and froze. Ruby Jo slid away and stood behind Redbud. She commanded him to turn around and look her in the eyes. He did it seemingly against his will, quaking, his face bloodless. She told him that if he touched her sister again, he would lose his hands. Permanently.
As Redbud chanted under her breath, the boy looked down at his palms and frantically examined them as if searching for some sort of pain. Tears trickled down his face as he sank to his knees and thrust his hands between his legs to try to curb the agony. He was still yelling “My hands are on fire” as she walked back down the hall, arm in arm with Ruby Jo.
Lee was again thrust into a different scene. Redbud crouched behind a bookshelf with Billy and Ruby Jo. There was a crash in the kitchen, and Redbud peered through the slats. Belva was talking in a low voice with her hands up, as if calming a bobcat. Leroy appeared from behind the counter on all fours, his hair wild, crawling closer to Belva as she slowly stepped back. He raised up on his feet and growled at her. He called her a demon and accused her of entering him and making him drink. He told her the only way to stop his drinking was to get rid of the demon. His left hand came up, and Redbud saw he was clutching a meat cleaver. She pulled a row of books down from the shelf, startling Leroy and turning his attention toward her. In that brief moment, Belva pounced on him and wrestled the knife away from his hand, kicking it across the floor.
Redbud picked it up, and she, Billy, and Ruby Jo ran out the door and into the woods, where they buried it. She lit a candle from her pocket, and they held hands over the dirt, whispering to themselves, “And he went down alive into the grave, with everything he owned; the earth closed over him, and he perished, and was gone from the community.” Billy took out his pocketknife, and they each slashed their palms. They brought their three hands together over the new mound of dirt, squeezing until they burned, and the blood ran down their wrists and into the dark soil.
Then, Leroy was lugging a suitcase into an old Ford Coupe with a low bottom. Belva stood on the porch with her arms crossed and both eyes purple and yellowed. Redbud and little Billy stood at her side with the same resolute posture, and Ruby Jo cowered behind them. A pile of belongings sat on the grass. When Leroy was done loading the car, he stormed back to the house and attempted to go up the steps to the porch, but something invisible blocked him. He charged at it again and again until he gave up. He shouted at Belva and pointed at the children. He said that she couldn’t hide from him in the house forever. He threatened to find her, and his children, wherever they went, before driving away, weaving in a crazed pattern.
It shifted again: Redbud stepped from a car on top of a high ridge. She looked down and saw a white bedsheet covering something on the bank of a small creek. The black Ford Coupe sat overturned in the water with brown and clear glass bottles smashed against the rocks and floating downstream. Belva knelt down and shielded Redbud’s face from the scene with a hug. But Redbud was calm and collected over her shoulder, those eyes flashing and her mouth betraying the tiniest smile.
And then they were in a memory that had become so familiar to Lee over the past few days that it was like coming home. The nailing of the boots, Lee’s period, the gathering, the sheriff showing up on their doorstep. Once again, those pivotal hours unfolded before her.
After Redbud thrust her black book into the fire, Lee saw something she hadn’t registered before: a glimpse of a person in one of the white house’s windows, watching Redbud. It was a nine-year-old Lee, a witness to something so consequential that she had forgotten it completely.
The flashes of memory gained speed as they moved through the years of the shadow’s independent reign. It prowled the hills outside of Redbud’s body and tormented her with her basest desires made real.
There Redbud was, a few years later. Her wrists had started hurting from grinding the deli hunks against the blade, and she asked the town doctor if he had anything for the pain that would let her keep working. Redbud had abandoned Belva’s remedies along with the rest of the magic. He gave her a sample for a new kind of pill.
She took a few back at home and started cleaning. Thirty minutes later, she walked outside. The grass was cool and soft against her bare feet. The sunshine was warm and sparkling. She lay down on the ground, and for the first time since she killed her husband, she could feel the power of the earth rising from below and entering her. Her body floated up into the light, lifted by power, transcending all pain and torturous thought.
She was herself again.
Lee tried to look away from the next images, various scenes of taking drugs and the things she did to pay for them. The stints in jail. Then she heard a moan ripping through the flashes, and she was thrust back into the clearing.
Redbud was on her knees in front of the shadow, tearing at her hair, spit flying as she wailed. She curled on the ground and sobbed. Lee could feel her energy draining. She was losing herself to the shadow.
Lee crouched next to her and instinctively put her thumb to Redbud’s wrist, reversing the stream of memories and pouring her own in like water.
A few months before Lee left for college, Redbud stopped drinking and taking pills. She woke up every morning and made a simple breakfast. She cleaned. She got a part-time job at the library. She bought Lee a new comforter from Target, a splurge, for her dorm bed. And some evenings, when the clouds pulsed with heat lightning, she and Lee would sit on the porch and talk until they passed out.
In late August, Redbud drove her to the bus station, and it wasn’t what Lee had imagined. A big part of her was itching with the need to escape with both middle fingers up. But there was this tender sliver that felt she was leaving something behind. Redbud hugged her hard and told her to never come back, and Lee could feel the love in it. She wanted Lee to have a better life, no matter the cost. Lee pulled away first and gave her a perfunctory smile before boarding the bus. But as they drove away, the bus moving out of sight, Lee broke down, her own love for her mother burning inside of her.
Redbud opened shining eyes and got to her feet. She stepped toward the looming shadow so that they were almost touching and stared into the void of its face. Then she opened her arms and took one final step toward it, wrapping herself around its middle. At first it seemed solid, like she was hugging a statue. But then she gradually began to sink into it. The shadow slowly engulfed her arms, her torso, her legs. The wind picked up around them, and Redbud looked at Lee with eyes filled with love and regret, before her head disappeared entirely into the shadow and the fire was snuffed out, plunging them into darkness.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lee stood watch on the porch with Cliff’s sleeping body slumped warmly against her. He’d insisted on staying up until Meredith returned.
Out of the endless, tumbling darkness, they had all reached for the sudden light of Billy’s headlamp to ground themselves. He had trained the beam on the center of the group where Redbud crouched on her hands and knees. She was alone; the shadow had disappeared. When Redbud looked up at them in the thin shaft of light, Lee could see an inky depth had returned to her eyes. Lee pulled her up to standing by her arm, and her firm, looming pose recalled the stance of the shadow. The connection lingered between Lee and Redbud, weakening by the moment, but she could feel the shadow’s anger and appetite pulsing from her.
Redbud and her shadow had been reunited. She would no longer be tormented by her rage and shame made external, out of her control, prowling the hills to torture her. She had accepted it as part of herself.
Redbud had told Lee in a voice like metal scraping stone that she knew where to find Meredith. Lee had tried to follow her into the trees, but she commanded her to stay.
So now she waited for her to bring Meredith home. She refused to consider that it hadn’t worked.
The only part of Lee that moved was her mind as it went about accepting and integrating all that had happened over the past weeks. She now recognized that like most mountain folk, she possessed a vein of fierce, magical energy inside her that could take many forms—rage, or a stubborn intelligence, or a thick gray melancholy. It was part inheritance, part product of all that she’d survived. It wasn’t a rotted wrongness at the center of her.
Over the years with Cooper, she’d become mostly melancholy. The other parts had no place in her new life, and she’d suppressed them until she could no longer feel their presence.
But they’d always been there, waiting for her.
All night, she had been tricked by rustlings in the woods that never yielded any figure. But now, as she heard something new, she could make out slivers of glowing skin, and she allowed herself to hope.
Her mother came through the trees alone, her black hair dull in the moonlight, and it filled Lee with rage. She wanted to claw her open, looking for the shadow inside.
Then another figure emerged behind her. She was thin and smudged with dirt, but Lee knew her. She leapt from the porch and wrapped herself around Meredith and sobbed into her tangled hair. Cliff’s small body clung to her on the other side, and Meredith silently relaxed in their arms and allowed her legs to go limp.
Redbud led the three of them into the house, where they cocooned Meredith in blankets and fed her hot herbal tea and as much food as she could stomach. She didn’t speak a word. Lee then helped her into a warm bath and washed her hair like she was a small child again, rinsing the soap with a cup. Leaves and burs and a few bugs floated in the murky water.
Lee put her to bed in Belva’s room and got in, careful not to clutch at her. Meredith fell asleep almost instantly, and Lee lay there listening to her slow, shallow breathing. She hadn’t slept since Meredith was taken, and her limbs began to relax into the bed, one by one. She always kept most of her stress in her jaw, perpetually clenched, biting down hard to get through it. She felt it start to slacken as her head sank deeper into the pillow, falling through its cotton, falling into nothingness.
She was safe.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When Lee woke, Meredith was gone.
She staggered, dizzy and heart pumping in yesterday’s clothes, to the kitchen where she saw Meredith, Cliff, Kimmie, Billy, and Redbud huddled together in front of the window. Lee wedged herself between them.
Cooper stood in the front grass looking up at the house in a daze. His blond hair was boyish in the morning sun. There was something about this setting that made him look even weaker than she’d seen him when they were together. She went outside to meet him.
“Coop?”
“Lee. What happened to you? You look…”
Lee studied her reflection in the window and saw her soil-streaked clothes; the tangled nest of her hair; her larger, thicker, more powerful body. Black fire ash was smudged around her eyes and across her cheekbones. She looked down at him without answering, and he seemed to cower slightly.
“Last night you texted Meredith came back?”
“Yes, she’s here.”
“Can I see her?”
“Sure.”
“I… I can’t seem to get inside the house.” He looked unnerved as he contemplated the air in front of him. He was not used to confronting barriers.
She took his hand and led him forward. She could feel him gliding through some thickness in the air around the house, like pulling him through butter. He looked around in wonder for a moment, but by the time they made their way through the door, the mask was back up.
