It Will Just Be Us, page 9
“It’s there,” said Meriday, pointing. They all looked.
Jonah saw the concern on August’s face before he schooled himself. “Fox fire,” he explained.
Unsettled, the family was eager to get to the camp as soon as possible, but after another hour passed, they seemed to be going in circles—around the flame that now refused to move or disappear but hovered in the air, burning a hole in the world.
Several times, August tried his compass; each time he put it back in his pocket with a shake of his head. Compasses don’t work in the swamp, you see. They get confused. There is something strange in the magnetic field.
“Come,” said August. “The Lord will guide our way tonight.”
* * *
At last, after hours of slogging through near-impassable marsh, they made it. August left them to retrace his lonely steps while shadowed figures crept out warily to greet the newcomers.
That first night, Meriday could not sleep.
They were given beds of broom straw, surrounded by the log cabins of the settlement, some with raised floors and porches for when the floods soaked the higher ground. They would soon learn that nothing stays dry in the swamp; one must get used to being always damp. Meriday’s feet were still wet and sore from the trek, the straw rough on her back, and she felt lonesome and afraid of this new place with its foul stench and its unfamiliar denizens. She gazed up through the thicket of trees into the fractured moonlight and the stars beyond, listened to the sounds of critters roaming in the dark, and wondered if she would ever feel safe.
By and by, however, Meriday came to love the swamp.
What had, in those first grueling insufferable days, seemed a hellish isolated place filled with myriad dangers scarcely imagined by the girl, came to feel more and more like home. Each night the bleating of frogs and buzzing of nightly insects became more familiar, and she learned to navigate the flooded areas around their dry island, although her parents warned her never to stray far, and certainly not beyond the barrier of vegetation that grew densely around them, or into the surrounding marsh where footing was treacherous amid the slick snarl of roots and quicksand.
There were other children to play with here, and in the evenings everyone sat around the fire and passed a white clay pipe, smoking and laughing and sharing fantastic stories.
Jonah went to work building their new home with the aid of several young men. Clementine traded recipes with the other women as they cooked up the hogs and fowl that were either raised or hunted, or shucked the corn they were able to grow in the acidic soil, or gutted fish they caught in the rivers. Everyone pitched in, and they were glad to do so. The work, though hard, was happy, independent—all manner of things Meriday had never known. That work could be joyous, could be done for one’s own self.
Living alongside the colony was a Cherokee tribe that had been in the swamp for many years. It was from them that Meriday learned that the stones they used as tools had been refashioned out of Indian arrowheads, that some of their pots were repurposed from Indian pottery, that all they used here was either from the swamp or recycled from those old societies that had long survived in this mystical land.
While the house was being built, Meriday slept on the carpet of dead leaves that covered the island, enjoying this strange freedom, the naturalness of it, while her parents bunked on their makeshift bed of straw.
Several times she had caught her mother standing or kneeling on the edge of the island, staring out into the water and the creeping vegetation, her eyes glazed with unrealized tears, and she wondered if her mother was crying.
Yes, Clementine was crying. Of course she was. Not from something as simple as sadness, though; until now, her body had been owned, had been possessed, by someone else. This power structure had defined her life, had defined the very way she perceived her own body. But now she was taking ownership of herself. She was reclaiming herself. In a world that would seek to control her body, this body was hers; in a world that would seek to silence her, this voice was hers; and she vowed, in that very moment, kneeling on the bed of the creek with tears breaking loose from her eyes, that she would never be possessed by anyone ever again. She would rather die.
When Meriday dared to break her out of this reverie and ask what was the matter, she took the girl into her arms and said, “Nothing at all is the matter, Merry child.” Clementine brushed a hand over her eyes and said, “Go on now. Go on and play. I hear Mr. Charles is making a flute. Would you like to hear him play it when he’s finished?” Meriday nodded. “Go on, then. Perhaps you can offer your help. Make yourself useful.”
Meriday nodded again and took off, glancing back only once to see her mother kneeling on the ground, a hand over her mouth, staring into the hanging vines with divine wonder.
It was one of the last times she saw her mother alive.
* * *
They were in the camp only a few weeks when Clementine disappeared.
Certainly, she shouldn’t have gone off by herself. Particularly in the dark of night. But she couldn’t sleep, said Jonah, who had noticed her tossing and turning as he drifted in and out of consciousness. One moment she was there beside him and when next he opened his eyes, she was gone.
He hadn’t been immediately concerned; sometimes she grew restless at night and went out to look at the stars and think whatever nighttime thoughts came to her mind in the secret hours before dawn.
But when he woke again in the dark and she still wasn’t there, an ill foreboding filled him. He rose to find her. She wasn’t anywhere in the camp.
Jonah took a lantern and tried to imagine what would compel his wife to venture into the swamp at this time of night.
“Clementine?” he called out. He searched for the better part of an hour, nearly stumbling to his death tripping over angry roots, and when he found her, the first thing he saw wasn’t even his wife but the fox fire that had lured her out there.
It appeared as a pair of small glowing flames that hovered before Clementine’s beguiled face. She seemed hypnotized by the dancing light, for she did not acknowledge Jonah as he drew nearer, set down his lantern, and reached out to her.
But before he could take hold of his wife, he made the mistake of glancing into the water below, over which the fox fire floated.
Illuminated vaguely by the moonglow and the tiny flames and the lantern that sat perched on a small grassy knoll, he saw a figure reflected in the water that did not exist above it—and its eyes were two flames, the flames into which his wife was gazing with mad ecstasy, two flames perched within the sockets of a terrible ancient face, a face that was not a face, of a creature that appeared, in the reflection, to be hovering above the water and reaching one twisted arm like a gnarled tree branch toward Clementine, whose name Jonah cried out in horror, who turned to look at him with surprise, like a sleepwalker abruptly jolted awake.
But the look lasted only a moment.
In the next, Clementine was yanked by unseen hands into the water, which swallowed her whole.
Later, the others would gently suggest to Jonah that she had lost her footing. The mud here was treacherously slick. People slipped all the time.
Jonah did not hesitate to dive into the sludgy water. In a moment, he was enveloped by the cold black as he blindly fought his way down through the weeds. What he found when he got to the bottom, however, was not his wife; he found an underwater hole that opened up into some dark recess below.
Would he have happily descended into that bottomless pit if he’d believed he would be able to drag his wife back to the surface? Of course. But he thought of sweet Meriday awakening the following morning, frightened and alone. He swam back to the surface, pulled himself coughing and wet onto the bank, and watched the water desperately in hopes that Clementine, too, would find her way back. But it was not to be, and the longer he sat waiting, the more hope dwindled.
Mad with grief, Jonah raced back to camp, hardly caring about the branches that scratched his face. By the time he woke two of the men, they gazed into his raving eyes with a small measure of fear. But they were quick to rise and follow him back out, and, being good men, both jumped into the water to see if they could fish out Clementine’s body. They both drew the line at the underwater hole, though. Neither was willing to dive that deep.
They sat together, swamp water mingling with Jonah’s tears, the chirp of wakening birds mingling with his friends’ words of consolation. By and by, the sun came up, and they all knew there was not a chance in the world Clementine was still alive. She had been underwater for hours.
Just as the men were preparing to make their way back to camp, a burst of bubbles broke the surface above the underwater hole, which froze Jonah in his tracks. He stopped and stared, mesmerized, at the cloud of bubbles, signaling movement, a release of air.
Then a hand reached up out of the water and dug its claws into the muddy bank.
The men were so startled that they did not even reach down to help. The hands pulled laboriously and a muddy head emerged, followed by a torso, and then a full body made almost unrecognizable by the mire.
But Jonah recognized her. Of course he did.
He would recognize his wife anywhere.
Later, Jonah would think back on this moment with a sick look on his face and stumble over the telling of it in the Wakefield house. The woman who crawled out of the swamp, smelling like death, was his wife … but at the same time, not his wife. She was changed.
Beneath the mud her eyes were strange—glassy, reflective, like two pools of dark water. Clementine walked heavily, dribbling continually out of every orifice.
When she spoke, her voice warbled as if underwater. “Jonah?”
The two men crossed themselves and called her the devil, but Jonah took her in his arms—feeling her cold, slimy flesh against his and the tangled ropes of her dripping hair—and was filled with a relief so profound it overshadowed even the truth that she had been underwater for hours, that she could not possibly be alive.
“It is a miracle,” he said.
They returned to camp, the other men hurrying ahead. Jonah helped Clementine, who moved rigidly as if her limbs were planks of wood. Much as he tried to warm her, she remained cold to the touch. Her skin was loose and waterlogged.
Back at the camp, the rumors spread quickly. By the time they arrived, the men and women out breakfasting already knew about Clementine’s fall, and their eyes showed fear. While Jonah found Clementine some dry clothes, the two men told the others in hushed tones what had occurred.
In their little house, Meriday saw her mother and was glad. She had heard the rumor that her mother had had an accident, and she had been sitting there hugging her knees to her chest. But her mother brought in with her that awful, rotten smell, and Meriday did not want to go near her. She listened, however, when her father asked her mother how it was possible—how she was alive.
“The witch sent me back,” said Clementine through muddy lips, and Meriday had the sensation that she could hear her mother’s voice before she even spoke, in a kind of watery echo. “I saw the place where she comes from,” she continued. “A place at the beginning and the end of the world. Come with me and I will show you.”
By now Jonah was experiencing such a mixture of emotions he could not hope to untangle them—joy, relief, fear. She reached out for him, dry, wearing dry clothes, and when he grabbed on to her outstretched wrist, the skin began to flake off like bits of paper. Calm as ever, she got up, went out to the edge of the island, and dunked herself in the water until she was sufficiently wet again.
All the rest of that day, Clementine was the terrible marvel of the camp. By that evening, Jonah had agreed to let the Cherokee hold a purification ritual to cleanse her spirit. They burned herbs and chanted in their native tongue while Clementine sat before the fire, which lit her slick skin ghoulishly.
Smoke billowed up from the fire and the damp burning herbs like a spell of demons, the smoke conjured by wet things. Clementine grinned with a mouth blackened by mud, which oozed out between her teeth. At first it seemed her glassy eyes reflected the fire, but in truth her eyes themselves now burned like flames.
Wind Walker saw within those hellish depths something that froze him with dread.
“Would you like to know the truth?” said Clementine. “She comes through a crack in the world. A hole. Comes from a place you could never imagine. She’s been in the swamp a long, long time.” The fire in her eyes danced and shivered, and Jonah felt a cold rush of fear. “She does not mean to hurt us, though. She wants us to experience the world like she does, in all its splendid glory. Here we are, stuck in our little minute, in our narrow little window of the world, when we could see everything—everywhen, the magnificence of it all.”
The tribe’s chief chanted louder.
The undead woman looked at her husband. “She says there will come a time when our people are free. And there will come a time when the Indians take back what is theirs. But that is all far from now, and we shall never see it in this lifetime. Don’t you want to be free?”
“We are free,” Jonah said, through his budding tears. “We are free.”
“The only way to be free, truly free, is to die, to cast it all off,” she said. “Life binds us to our here and now.”
Jonah shook his head.
“I will help. You and Meriday—we shall all go together.”
He stood up. “No!”
Before he could grasp her by the arms, shake her, call forth his wife from wherever she might yet live buried in that unholy flesh, a plume of smoke obscured her from him, and in the confusion he lost sight of her.
Then she was standing before the chief, grasping his throat as gouts of dirty swamp water issued from his parted lips, an impossible geyser, his eyes popping as he shuddered. When she let go, he fell still, water trickling gently from his mouth to seep into the soil.
The others scattered, the wind carrying off their screams in their desperation to escape.
Another burst of smoke from the crackling flames, and Clementine skittered off again.
Jonah stood beside Wind Walker, both frozen with shock.
The moment of silence was broken when Jonah remembered what Clementine had said about him—and Meriday.
* * *
They had told Meriday to stay in the cabin and not to come out, no matter what she heard. Naturally, she had pressed her ear against the cracks in the wooden wall to listen to what was going on outside. She heard drumming and chanting but could not make any sense of it, so she retreated to her bed, where she sat playing with a doll her mother had made of straw. She was content in her play until she heard the door creak open, but it was dark inside and she could not make out anything but a figure in the doorway, outlined by the fire still burning outside.
“Come, Merry child,” said the figure, holding out a hand. “I promise it will not hurt.”
There was nowhere else to go—only one door. When her mother walked over to her, where could she have run?
But the hand she took was cold, with the muculent feel of a tree root that’s been submerged for many years, and though this sodden woman was her mother, yes, she was afraid.
* * *
By the time Jonah arrived at their cabin, he knew something was wrong.
The door hung askew like a yawning mouth, inviting him into the darkness within. His flickering torch revealed a floor covered with muddy footprints and no sign of Meriday except her doll, which lay abandoned on the floor.
Jonah let out a sound like a wounded animal. Wind Walker, adept at tracking, knelt down in the dead, wet leaves and told Jonah to follow him.
They tracked Clementine and Meriday into the swamp, far enough that Jonah lost all sense of where they were. When he found Clementine and Meriday standing hand in hand at the bank of a root-choked river, he shouted for his daughter.
“Daddy!”
But Clementine did not let go of her hand, and now Jonah could see the two small flames hovering in the air.
“Let her go,” said Wind Walker. He took the torch from Jonah, who found himself too afraid to move, to startle his wife, or whatever she had become.
“My daughter will be free,” said Clementine. Meriday did not struggle but stared at her father, eyes wide as dreadful moons.
“You cannot listen to the witch,” said Wind Walker. “She is an evil spirit. Now let go of the child.”
She only tightened her grip.
Wind Walker thrust the torch into Clementine’s back.
Meriday was able to break free. She fell in the mud and scrambled for purchase as Jonah grabbed her around the waist and hauled her up to him.
Pieces of Clementine’s clothing caught fire, but otherwise she was too wet and only smoldered in the flame, releasing a heavy black smoke while her eyes burned in their sockets.
“It is a blessed thing she ended up in the swamp,” said Clementine through her mouth of mud, her flaming eyes laughing at the dropped torch, which the water quickly consumed and made impotent. “If she lived on dry land, she would burn a hole right through the world wherever she walks.”
She seized Wind Walker’s throat with her clawed fingers. For a moment he was enveloped in the putrid stench of mold and rotting vegetation, and his mouth filled with hot swampy liquid, but he managed to break free from her grasp, shove her away, where she fell into the water. Spitting out a mouthful of sludge, he turned to meet Jonah and Meriday, and all three of them took off into the forest without a look back.
Soon it became clear that in their mad blind dash through the midnight swamp, they had lost their way. Spectral pine and sweet-gum oak towered above them, shrouding the sky and the land beyond, barred with an endless vista of trunks emerging from marshy soil. They turned and turned, knowing with dread deep in their hearts that the swamp was vast and eternal, and they were lost.
They walked all night and into the next morning, when the mystery of the dark gave way to the thick heat of day, and finally the trees began to thin; and Jonah recognized this place and knew which way to turn; and they found themselves heading out of the swamp and toward the looming shape of Wakefield Manor.
