The Ash Family, page 15
The hands moving me away felt good, like they were stretching me out after the high jump when my body fell onto my head and knocked me out in a curious way, when I was awake and could not move, and I could hear but not feel the hands slapping my face, and an assortment of track fathers carried me off the blue mat. Isaac sat with me in the ambulance, slapping my face and saying, “Stay with me, Berie,” which was hilarious. Then at the hospital I could not remember what month it was but I knew it was spring.
I rested in the shadows, abandoned now, and I clasped my shaking hands. I watched several people heave Pear up, and she leaned on them, limping away from the circle of light, holding her neck. I sat up against the wall; my breath came out of my mouth, choking.
Dice walked toward me. His face was so weathered I could not read it. I’d been so certain I’d done what he wanted. Maybe I’d done it the wrong way, too hard. I wondered if I’d really hurt her. I didn’t want to get in trouble; I noticed, unable even to disapprove of myself, that I cared more about getting in trouble than whether I’d really hurt her.
Dice knelt beside me. He put his hand at the back of my skull and angled my face toward him. “You’re a good girl,” he said.
CHAPTER 18
That night, I lay in a bottom bunk, watching the mattress above me bow as someone turned. I could not remember biting Pear; I only remembered her throat, soft like risen cream. I’d done it, hadn’t I.
Dice had said I was a good girl, and I told myself to believe him, to give myself that gift of certainty. But tonight, nothing felt certain. I remembered lying on a couch all day in Isaac’s squat, the light of the glowing coils in the space heaters he had to use, because they couldn’t ask the landlord to turn on the heat. I remembered my mother bringing home gifts from her knickknack store, the “Solar Queen” plastic figurine, which wore a pink plastic skirt suit, with a little hand always elegantly waving as long as the sun shone. But I couldn’t remember feeling happy with Isaac, or happy with my mother, or interested, or excited. All the Durham memories were empty. I felt as though they had happened to someone else. Dice had said my hand would cast out the splinter if I let it. I wished my mind too could take these foreign objects and cast them out.
The next day started dim and remained that way, cloudy and dreadful to behold. I was going to take my love and spread it around, I was going to get to know everyone. At breakfast, I noticed the family seemed sparse. Pear didn’t appear, and neither did Dice, Rainer, and Gemini, our guardian.
Bay sat next to me at breakfast. “Let me make you something good,” he said. He spread cottage cheese and honey for me on Bip’s bread, which was falling apart, because Bip hadn’t had time to knead all twenty loaves fully—Pear wasn’t around to help him.
“Where is everyone?” I said.
“The men went out to find Queen,” Bay said.
I thought about Queen driving Pear’s car down through the black woods after the harvest festival. I imagined the dogs following the car, following her sweet spicy breath that reminded me of chai. I missed her. But I didn’t know whether I wanted her to come back.
“Did Pear go with them?” I asked Bay, as heavy crumbs plunked onto my plate.
“She went to the medicinal plant nursery on the family’s behalf.”
I set my tea down and looked at my hands. They didn’t look like hands that could throw a person to the floor. I couldn’t imagine how I had done it. Dice had been the lightning and I had been the rod. I knew what that meant now. I was the tool. I wasn’t to blame.
I pastured the sheep, mucked out the stable, then helped Sara string up runner beans to dry. We’d revitalize them in winter stews.
We sat in the kitchen, baskets of beans all around us. She kept inhaling as though to say something, but nothing came of it.
If Queen had been there, we might have kneaded butter or watched the sunset from the warm boulder above the long house. We would have planned to ride the horses bareback to the waterfall, where I’d never been. She’d told me there was a place where you could stand right and see the rainbow all around you in every direction.
I kept trying with Sara. I desperately wanted to ask if the rebirth meant I couldn’t participate in the upcoming action. But I was too nervous to ask and hear her say no. Instead, I said, “What do you like about the fall?”
“I like being near Dice,” she said. And then a long pause.
“Well,” I said, “at least it’s nice to sit down to work.”
“I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to,” she said. She showed me the big gash she had on her thigh, the result of a kick from a nervous, mastitis-infected heifer. “A weeping wound,” she called it. I got those words stuck in my head. Weeping wound.
“I wish Pear were here to fix that up for you,” I said. Sara gave me a hard look and turned away.
After lunch, Sunny came toward me. “Harmony, come help me get dinner,” he said. He had a bony, angled face, sharp cheeks, sharp chin. I thought he meant to town, and my heart began to beat. “Roadkill,” he explained.
We took a green wheelbarrow and walked forty-five minutes down the gravel path to the chalk-blue road. The air nipped at my bare neck.
We continued a few miles down the road. A car passed every ten minutes, headlights making the dark afternoon look even darker.
“There!” I said, pointing out some animal remnant squashed flat on the dotted yellow line. Sunny and I approached.
“Poor varmint,” said Sunny. “A sorry sight.” The animal had been gray, maybe a cat or a raccoon. It looked like we’d have to peel it off the asphalt with a spatula. “There’ll be better ones.”
The sun sank below the cloud cover, lighting up the whole sky a monstrous orange-brown. As we crested a hill, Sunny spotted a dead deer on the road’s shoulder. He bent down low over the creature, showed me the fleas still hopping on her fur.
“We always look for fleas. Fleas are for the living. They won’t stick around on a long-dead corpse.”
Blood rimmed the deer’s mouth, but still I was afraid that we would wake her as we hauled her into our barrow. We took turns pushing her back up the hill, back toward the woods.
“Sunny,” I said, “do you think they’ll find Queen?”
“Hope so.”
I wanted her back, for selfish reasons. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to find her. If she was alive, I wasn’t sure what they would do to her. If she was dead . . . I didn’t want Queen to die out there, because she was maladapted for that environment or because—but surely Dice didn’t kill fugitives. If they never found her, at least I could imagine she’d found a life she liked. “I heard,” I said, testing, “that people who leave often die out there.”
Sunny gave me no sign. “The fake world is dangerous,” he said.
“Sunny,” I said, “what happened to Pear? I mean, after . . .” I didn’t want to say after I attacked her.
“You know.”
“Gathering herbs,” I said, “I heard.”
He was silent a long while. I worried I’d pushed too hard. I worried he wouldn’t respond at all. I kept reminding myself to stop caring so much about outcomes. Get relativity.
“She died, Harmony.”
I felt sweat prickle all my skin at once.
Sunny said, “She was bleeding in her head, we didn’t realize.” I imagined her in Dice’s room after the rebirth, gasping. “It was an accident, Harmony.” He stopped the wheelbarrow, took my shoulders, and turned me toward him. “Dice said it was an accident.”
I hadn’t intended to cry, but he spoke so softly that now I felt I had to. He reached out his arms to me. We embraced, and I was crying so hard I worried I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I was a weeping wound.
I’d meant to attack her, but I hadn’t meant to kill her. She could have been saved at the hospital, but I tried to forget that. Maybe she had known all along what would happen, but I tried to forget that too.
Gently, so gently I barely noticed, like when your arms wrap around you before you even notice that you’re cold, another thought came to my mind. I wondered if I’d been trapped. I imagined darting back to the road, leaping in front of a car, pinwheeling my arms, begging for a ride—but I couldn’t go. I’d killed someone in front of twenty-three witnesses. If I stayed with the family, then Pear’s death would always be an accident. Dice called it an accident, and so it would be true. I laughed once—“Ha!” Sunny turned to me as though he knew exactly why.
fall
CHAPTER 19
The cold blew in that night. We gathered on the porch in the crystalline early-fall morning. The little pool of water where the kitchen sink drained was so blue it looked like paint. Bay’s car was gone now, too—Bay’s car was gone, Pear’s car was gone, Dice’s truck was gone.
Sara and Sunny described the tasks for the day. “Haying time,” Sara said. “Who wants to come?” No one volunteered at first, so I raised my hand, thinking of my rebirth. The family members nodded congenially at me, though just two days ago they’d torn me apart.
I raked while Sunny drove the mower that cut down the spindly stalks of alfalfa, timothy, and orchard grass, which grew all over the slopes. We let the hay dry in the fields, then the next day we raked it into long snaking piles, windrows. We pitchforked the windrows up onto the horse-drawn wagon. The horses brought the wagon up to the highest part of the barn, up the ramp that couldn’t support a tractor, and then we forked the hay down to the loft in loose piles.
The raking—that was the hell, hot, strenuous, and dusty, endless. I couldn’t, hard as I tried, become a mountain lion or a sheep and focus only on my purpose. Most modern farms had a mechanical swather to do the job, and a tedder to turn the hay for drying, but we couldn’t afford those luxuries. Pear was dead, and Queen was gone, and no thank you, I have already been saved.
I wished I could wheel time backward, before the rebirth, before the miscarriage, Rainer and Queen falling away from each other, Queen stepping down the ladder, ungritting her teeth. Before Rainer and Lindsay came, back to the winter, when all I worried about was when Bay would touch me again.
I thought I could see the family clearly now, see the good and bad. The bad was that Pear had died, though there was no definite self, I knew. And the good was everything else. The good was nighttime breath in the long house like frothing waves, the nicotiana, pawpaws, and cardoons, the moths fluffing themselves dry of dishwater, the fugueing tunes and fire on cold nights, the slamming rain and Earth history and huge plates of ice we found in the winter with silvery leaf impressions frozen into them. The good was the mountain lion with leaf-green eyes shouldering through the woods, even though they were supposed to be extinct. The good was the little owl who’d hurtled out the window.
And besides, down in the deep, I knew that I was trapped. Trapped good and proper. If death was the worst outcome, well, that was true for everyone on Earth; weren’t we all trapped? Get relativity. We raked the hay. We forked the piles into the wagon. We drove the hay up the highest ramp of the barn, forked it down. The barn’s top levels filled to the rafters with hay, which smelled like a lover’s hair—Bay’s in particular. When the wind blew in, the chaff rose in a flickering mass. We worked until we could hardly stand. I wondered if my exhaustion would satisfy the family.
After two weeks—we were into September now; someone had switched the plaque in the holder—Dice and Rainer and Gemini returned, early in the morning. The dogs preceded them, beastly white.
Gemini drove Pear’s maroon car, the car Queen had taken. The sight of it set my head ringing.
Dice and Rainer exited the truck. They beckoned for help unloading their boxes of Dumpstered produce, and I grabbed a basket and followed Sara toward them to pick out fruit for the chickens. If they asked me why, I would say I was trying to volunteer more for tasks. But I was just desperate to hear news of Queen.
Dice put his hand on Sara’s neck and pulled her against him, then released.
“Where is she?” Sara asked.
He shook his head. “We followed her to Marshall, then found just the car.”
Queen was fine. She was safe. I reminded myself that this was the best outcome—Queen alive and elsewhere, no longer available to tempt me into disloyalty. But I missed her.
That night, we circled the chairs for a story. Dice said that the permafrost in Siberia was melting and around graveyards the thawing corpses were infecting people with anthrax and smallpox. And once the permafrost melted all the way, whoosh, up into the air all that carbon would go, carbon equal in quantity to another industrial revolution. People kept finding animals in the permafrost, mastodons and steppe bison and cave lion cubs, ancient horses, rhinos, mammoths, their meat fresh enough to eat, their blood still liquid in their veins.
Something terrible was lurching out there in the dark, blundering its way closer. Dread, that was the feeling of haying time. Dice said, “Siberia will melt. The rain forests will burn down. The oceans will stop mixing. And the wars will start.”
The next afternoon, Dice caught up with us in the hayfields. One by one we stopped raking. Everyone smiled closed-lipped smiles. He told us to gather what was dry, then beckoned to me. I stepped forward, immediately nervous.
“Go find the sheep, Harmony.”
I dropped my rake. Here was a chance to prove myself.
“Rainer couldn’t find them,” he warned. He picked up my rake and began tightening the windrow. He knew exactly how to roll and lift the hay for the pitchfork. He made everything look easy.
“I’ll manage,” I said.
He nodded, and I headed off to the distant pastures. I’d been walking only a few minutes, scrambling over gulches to the sheep’s little coves, when I noticed the thunderhead, dark brown and sharp at the edges, mounting in the west. I hoped the others would save all the hay we’d cut. A wind thrashed the branches. I saw the lightning like spider legs stalking over the ridge.
The clouds smeared into the ground as though by a giant’s thumb, and I’d just begun to wonder about the rain when it filled my eyes and ears and trickled down my back, filling my pants, filling my shoes. The air was bright and crackling, all the dark branches were lashing sideways, and the hill was smoothed by a cape of water, which made a woooo noise like a ghost. I stumbled blindly upward. I felt as though the rain were stripping away my definite self, layer by layer, till I was just a thread of heat.
Buckled over, I sought the ridge. I saw at once the long thin arm of lightning point down and touch a pine on the ridge, as if to say, HERE! The pine exploded, blasting off its robe of bark, and the raindrops squiggled through the air like sparks.
The cloudburst strode onward. The rain turned to a bright purple mist, which soon subsided into steam. The sun rendered the water out of the land like fat from meat. Little streams crisscrossed the hills. I approached the tree, stepping over peels of bark. The tree would die in a day or two. I shook in my sodden clothes.
I doubted I could find the sheep now. I leaned over with my hands on my knees and gathered my nerves. My body was rubbery. I kept walking. I walked for an hour through the mud. Why are you here, Harmony? someone had asked during my rebirth. Are you here—to enjoy yourself? . . . To pass the time? To fall in love? I walked until I slipped on the hillside and fell hard, gashing my tongue on my teeth. My eyes stung. But I could tell that very deep down I liked it, the same way I loved jumping and falling, and Bay’s burn on my hand. I didn’t have to wonder if I could feel more. I felt everything.
When I approached the courtyard, I heard the sheep bells. Had they returned home in the storm? I entered the stable and they ran toward me. Their wool was dry. I spat hot blood from my mouth.
Had Rainer found them? Had Dice tricked me? I rushed to the long house to find out. On the porch, Dice and Sara sat on rockers. They were laughing, and they seemed to be laughing at me, and for the first time I noticed that all of Sara’s molars were black holes.
CHAPTER 20
In late September, the first frosts laced our tired-out garden. I’d been with the family a year. At a breakfast, I heard Rainer ask Maybell about the action next month, something to do with the coal company clearing off all the mountaintops. My heart began to beat. I wanted so badly to be involved. “Bay will bring us a new brother first, to help out while we’re gone,” she said.
“Let me come,” Rainer said. I was sure she’d say no. He was newer than I was.
“It will be smaller than the last one,” she said. She smiled and touched his ear. “We’ll ask Dice.” They saw me staring and turned away.
Bay was due back soon. I had hoped that by now—a year in—I’d be trusted with showing a newcomer around, but I knew that after the rebirth I had to start from zero again. This time, Osha was in charge. She had a broad, ruddy Scandinavian face, flyaway hair, and energy for even the most onerous tasks. She was like Sara, invulnerable.
Bay’s car returned in late morning. I was on the porch, fixing a hole in the knee of my canvas pants, sewing with the same viney thread that Sara and I had used to string up the beans a month ago. Osha rushed out to greet the newcomer. I heard her say, “Right on time.” I kept my eyes on my sewing at first, because I wanted to seem busy.
“Here’s Harmony,” Osha said, “my wonderful sister.”
When I looked up, my stomach dropped. It was Isaac, my ex-boyfriend. Isaac, with his hammerhead eyes. I could scarcely believe it until I saw the claw tattoo on his temple.
Lindsay, I thought. Lindsay told. Then: He’s come to take me away. I wondered if he’d spoken with my mother—if she’d be coming too. I wondered what he’d do if I refused. If he’d try to get the police involved, calling it a kidnapping. Or if he’d try to number us—report us, get us for tax evasion, destroy the whole community. If investigators came they might look for Pear and link her death to me. I was a terrible liar—if they put me under oath, I did not know what I would say.
