Haints Stay (10 page)

After breakfast, John led Mary out behind the house. He carried a small
hatchet. Bird followed a few steps behind. Mary was crying and wiping her tears with
the backs of her hands. She did not normally cry and Bird was curious at it. It made
her appear much younger and smaller than she truly was.

“It will grow back,” said John, stopping before a stump.

Mary got on her knees and tilted her face away from the stump. She did
not speak. John set her braids on the stump and chopped them more than halfway off
with the hatchet. It happened in a single chop. Then the whole thing was over.

John gave the hair to Mary and said she could do what she wanted with it.
She wanted to bury it. She did not ask Bird to follow her and did not explain what
it was she was about to do. But he followed her and saw it all anyway.

She wandered into the dried-up orchard a few hundred feet from their
home. She dug a small pit with her fingers and set
the braids in
there. She pulled leaves from one of the least dead trees and scattered the leaves
over the braids coiled together in the hole like a handful of baby snakes. Then she
put the dirt back on top and cried a little more and turned to walk home. Bird
thought the funeral was nice and felt his appreciation of it as a kind of warmth
throughout his entire body.

“Did you know my name is Isabella ?” said Mary.

She and Bird were sitting on the lip of the stonewall encircling the
family well.

“I thought it was Mary,” he said.

“It's Isabella,” said Mary. “John named me Mary when he found me.”

“Where did he find you ?”

“I can't remember.”

“How do you know your name was Isabella ?”

“
Is
Isabella,” she said.

“How do you know your name is Isabella ?”

“I remember that part,” she said. “It's the part I remember.”

“What else do you remember ?”

It was mid-morning. The clouds were low and thick. They seemed to be
gathering. Bird did not want a storm. He did not like a storm and would grow more
and more afraid until it was over. He had not yet shown this family what he looked
like fully afraid and he was starting to think that maybe he would like to go a
little longer without showing them.

“Not much. I had a mother who was nice, and I liked her, I think. She
called me Isabella. We had a blue and white blanket that sometimes held me and
sometimes held corn. I remember touching the corn. What do you remember ?”

“From when ?”

“From before John found you.”

“Nothing, really,” said Bird. “I remember I was dragged behind a wagon or
a cart for what felt like forever.”

“John bandaged you and brought you through the night back to our home,”
she said. “We were all asleep when you got here and I ran out to greet him and there
you were. You were frightful to look at.”

“Yeah.”

“You were screaming and moaning.”

“Yeah.”

“You remember that ?”

“I remember John cutting into my shoulder.”

“I did not see that.”

“I could not look away, though he told me to.”

“Then what ?”

“Then we woke up and had biscuits.”

“What were your real parents like ?”

“I thought it was a dream,” said Bird. “I thought I was going to wake up
in the woods again.”

“With that thing ?”

“Before that, I guess.”

“Why were you in the woods ?”

“Can't remember.”

“What did your parents do ?”

“I don't know,” said Bird.

“What do you mean ?”

Bird was digging at the lichen between the stones, tearing it loose and
dropping the small pieces into the mouth of the well.

“I don't mean anything. They were farmers.”

“It can be hard to remember,” said Mary.

“Yes,” said Bird.

And then there were those men in the woods. But they
were wild. Everything they had, they had with them. No one was looking for them. In
fact, Brooke got the sense that they'd done some good by taking them down.
Certainly, they'd done what was right for themselves. Any court would see the truth
in their claims of self-defense.

There was the scarred Southerner. Something wrong with his face that
Brooke couldn't explain. The man had friends. He was well-liked for some reason.
Some men just smoothed along throughout life and never really got anyone
particularly ruffled in any negative kind of way. Brooke could not remember how they
had found themselves at his doorstep. But he had known why they were there. The man
had given chase through the living room and out the backdoor in his pajamas. There
was a pot of food in the fireplace and a candle burning at the desk. Before setting
out after him, Brooke and Sugar had made sure there was nothing much to come home
to. They'd done some real damage on the man's home, and stockpiled his weapons on
the backs of their horses.

He missed those horses. They never tired before it was time to settle.
They didn't make many demands at all. They liked an apple each. His own liked corn.
They were agreeable, handsome animals. He did not always get as much as he would
have liked of agreeable things.

The man was not a good runner. He was not used to moving in shadows or
progressing himself with regularity. His camps were easily spotted, easily tracked,
quickly abandoned, and easily destroyed. They, technically, had not killed him. They
had followed him around until the corpse revealed itself. He was not a hunter. He
did not seem to know the ways of tracking water. It
had been Sugar's
idea to wait it out and it was a good one. They rode on behind him, kept an eye on
him, but did not overtake him. For some time, he had probably assumed he was
proceeding well in his evasion. There was some kind of tragedy in that.

When it came to rounding up a hog, Bird was as good a partner as
John ever had. The boy was particularly skilled at motivating the pig without
startling it. Something in the boy either soothed the creature or hardly registered
with it. Either way, it crept along, keeping its distance from the boy but never
startling, lashing out, or darting. Bird managed to provoke the pig to the door at
the far edge of the pen without ever touching or even reaching out for it. When
John's hands fell upon the creature to pluck it out and hang it, the animal seemed
as startled as the day it was born.

“You spend much time with hogs ?” said John.

“I'm worried it is going to rain,” said Bird.

“Rain would be good,” said John. “But it won't rain.”

“The clouds are all bunched up and thick,” said Bird. “The air is all
heavy like a sponge.”

“Don't get your hopes up,” said John.

The drought had been going for nearly two months now. It was getting to
the family, cutting into what they could produce for trade. They were scraping by on
what the animals brought in. The well was keeping them in enough water to survive
and keep the creatures from dying off. But the situation could not hold forever.

“I have made that mistake,” said John, carrying the pig like a child
across the yard and into the barn. “It's only optimism. There's no harm in it. But
it does sting.”

He bound the animal's feet and hung them from a small hook
overhead. The earth beneath them was dark and hard. He removed a knife from a metal
sheet hammered into the wall and began to saw the throat of the pig. It curled its
body and tried to swing from him. Or that was how it looked. Either way, it
struggled and gurgled and bent against John's grip. Then the animal lost its voice.
John held the neck strong and cut deep. It sounded like a thick rope working into an
oak tree. Then the sound went hollow and blood fell from John's arms and the pig's
throat and the creature began to thrash. John stepped back and the pig spun its body
round and round, extending its head as far from its feet as its body would allow,
spraying blood along the walls in a circle. On the wall then, Bird noticed there was
fresh blood and old blood and stains that were unrecognizable.

Finally, the pig stopped. It centered and the corpse spun steadily on the
rope. Then John took it down and carried it to a large iron table at the front of
the barn.

“If we got some rain,” he said, “things would grow. There would be
nothing to be afraid of. We would have more money and more food. It's as simple as
that.”

John slit the creature from groin to sternum with a thin curving blade.
It seemed to bloom slightly, its purpled organs pushing out but not spilling. He
pulled them tenderly from the cavity and set them in several buckets behind him.
Bird could not recognize the various parts, but they were each glossy, with deep
coloring.

“No need to cower in the doorway,” said John. “She's as dead as she'll
ever be.”

Bird was still at the mouth of the barn. He had backed out during the
bleeding and was hovering there since. He did not need to advance. The image was
grisly and the smell was worse.

“It smells,” he said.

“That's iron,” said John. “Blood. Entrails. That's food and what makes it
food. You'd be better off knowing these things and accepting them. Whether or not
you stay with us or take off on your own some day, you'll need to accept what feeds
you and what it takes to stay fed.”

Bird had not given this the slightest bit of thought. Staying or going.
He knew he would not ever go back into the woods. He was suspicious of town.

He stepped into the barn and joined John by the pig. John was working a
new smaller knife beneath the skin of the animal and it was lifting away fairly
easily. A few white threads like cobwebs clung to the underside and stretched
between the skin and the muscle, but John was not forcing anything. It came off more
or less like a snake's skin, in several large pieces.

Bird began to tremble. His head went warm and he collapsed. When he woke
Martha was at his side. It was evening. He tried to lift each limb to determine if
he was bound, but all three rose.

“You fainted,” said Martha, “at the sight of a butchered pig.”

Bits of the pig came back to him. He pictured it spinning and screaming
its low scream.

“John moves fast,” she said. She had a small book in her hands, which she
closed and set on her lap.

“What time is it ?” said Bird. “Am I safe ?”

“Of course you're safe, little one,” she said. “You've lucked out being
found and brought here. There are far worse places to be brought.”

“Is John mad ?”

“No.”

“Why did I faint ?”

“Because of all you've been through, would be my guess,”
said Martha. “When John found me, I was mute and uncivil. I cannot reenter my old
way of thinking but I remember being fairly terrified of any sounds I might make and
the looks they would draw.”

“I don't want to faint,” said Bird. “I want to be able to help and
slaughter pigs.”

“There are lots of ways to help aside from gutting animals.”

“I want to be able to do what's needed,” said Bird.

“There is a variety to our need,” said Martha.

“How long does a pig last ?”

“For eating, they can last several months. Selling them, they go much
more quickly.”

“How long does it take to sell one ?”

“John traded the bulk of yours this afternoon.”

“Then we'll butcher a new one tomorrow,” said Bird.

“I think tomorrow you're riding for town,” said Martha.

“Why ? What if I don't want to go ?”

“There's a doctor there who will need to see your wound. And there is
trading to be done.”

“My wound is fine.”

“You're striking an attitude with me, little one. There's no reason for
it.”

“My name is Bird and I'd like to butcher a pig tomorrow.”

“That you're stubborn and proud is all you'll prove by doing so. Do as we
need, not just as you like.”

She rose and patted him on the head then.

“You are a handsome boy with an eager heart and we are grateful to have
you.”