Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (57 page)

He stopped and looked at his uncle, who had a few words with Grace.

“Why didn’t you just say so? Of course it’s all right, Finn!”

The men climbed up and got the horses trotting.

“What happened?” Adelaide asked.

Matthew grunted as they rode. He remained quiet for another mile.

“Kids,” he finally said.

“Kids what?” Adelaide asked.

“Four horses gone missing this morning,” Matthew explained. “Both of ours and two from the family who owns this property. Folks said they saw four boys riding off real early.”

“Four boys,” Adelaide repeated.

Adelaide had her hand around Matthew’s middle and she squeezed so tightly he coughed with surprise.

When Matthew reached her home he insisted on standing at the threshold of her shack and inspecting the interior. Adelaide told him what she knew about Mrs. Mudge and her boys, but Matthew had a hard time believing both that Mrs. Morrison was really Mrs. Mudge and that four blind boys could steal four horses. Though he wasn’t convinced, Adelaide’s story left him twitchy and protective. Adelaide didn’t argue when he asked to look inside her place. She invited him in. He left his rifle out on the horse.

Adelaide offered him tea, but he didn’t say yes or no. She realized, in that moment, that he wanted to stay. And she, to her own surprise, wanted him there. She doubted either of them felt true passion. Not love, but affection. And caution.

It occurred to Adelaide that she was the only person, besides Mr. Olsen, who could testify that Mrs. Mudge had four boys. And if these people stole horses, in a place where stealing livestock was a hanging offense, what might they do to silence a witness?

The ride back to Adelaide’s had taken them the whole day Very soon it would be that fathomless Montana night. Matthew looked out one window. “I guess I can make it to the ranch if I leave right now,” he said.

Wasn’t company a fine reason to keep a man around? Even just for tonight? If she was a different woman she might even have wanted him close for the promise of protection, but she had her own means right here in the room, in that steamer trunk. Compared to that, Matthew could only offer closeness, a night of warmth. But she reminded herself how long it had been since she’d been held.

“Go get your things,” she said. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

Matthew tried not to smile but couldn’t help himself. His chest rose and fell with enthusiasm. Just then he seemed even younger than 23.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Don’t make a woman offer twice.”

Matthew secured his horse while Adelaide went down to the root cellar for potatoes and beans and eggs that Grace had given her. Adelaide felt more ashamed of surviving on Grace’s charity than she did about the very young man sitting in her cabin. When the winter passed – presuming she made it through the first winter – she would have to become self-sufficient.

“What will you do first?” Matthew asked.

It didn’t sound like a question, more like a quiz. To Matthew and Finn and Grace Adelaide remained a newcomer, a tenderfoot, a pilgrim. Matthew’s tone played like Grace’s when she’d first visited with Stan. He’d probably asked what she planned to do only so he could overwhelm her with advice about what she should do. But Adelaide had been reading her secondhand almanac and planning quite seriously.

“I’m not required to plow up a whole forty acres when I plant for my first year, so I’m going to have just enough land broken for a garden,” she said. “That way I’m not setting myself up for the whole thing to fail in the first year. Especially if there isn’t much rain.”

“You’ll hire a man to break the land?” Matthew asked, as if insulted.

“I would pay a man to do it even if I knew him very well,” she said.

Matthew blushed and looked down at his plate. He cut into a small potato.

“I’ve got a few vegetable seeds I’ve ordered, but I’ll make sugar beets at least half the garden.”

Matthew raised his eyebrows, a piece of potato held high on his fork. “They’ll grow even if there’s drought. That’s a smart choice, Mrs. Henry.”

Now that was the tone she wanted to hear. Esteem. Respect.

“You’ll call me Adelaide if you’re here this late.” Then she set down her utensils and touched the top of her head and, for the first time in his presence, she let down her hair.

Matthew set down his fork, the potato uneaten. “Adelaide,” he said.

They were awkward together. She stood taller than him, and heavier as well. But though Matthew was small and slim, the man was strong. He climbed over her with a playful grin and when they wrestled each other flat neither of them held back. He touched her arms and found the small scars that ran along both forearms. More than a dozen little divots in the flesh of each one. He almost asked the question –
where did you get these?
– but was smart enough to read the expression on her half closed eyes. This wasn’t the time for telling histories. This wasn’t the time for words.

Afterwards she put the kettle on, and he brought her tea in bed. She had neither cream nor sugar, and the tea was bitter, but his smile was kind.
I could get used to this
, she thought.

Adelaide opened her eyes. She wore nothing and the covers were still drawn up around her. Someone was screaming somewhere, the howls faint and muffled. For a moment, she wasn’t sure where she could be – in Eagle Pass, Montana, or back home in Redondo.

Her home had gone madhouse. The great chair lay on its side and the top half of the wicker rocker was shredded, serrated, as if it had been bitten off. Her books were little more than shreds of paper scattered on the furniture like ash. The pans on the walls had all come down. Matthew’s blood spread on the floor and across the walls and windows.

The steamer trunk sat open and empty.

How had Adelaide slept through all this? When had the world gone so wrong? Her head ached. Outside it was still nighttime. The Montana wind howled as it crept up the side of her cabin and looped under the roof then crashed down to chill the room.

And there, in the corner, she saw it. It was out of the steamer trunk, its back to her, the mighty body pressed against the cabin wall. Great folds of leathery skin hung from the bottom of its arms. And just below those folds were a pair of bare feet. Matthew Kirby’s feet. Listlessly kicking. Not the sign of someone fighting, but of someone fading out. This thing, Adelaide Henry’s secret burden, the weight she’d been carrying her whole life was consuming him.

Adelaide felt, very quickly, the utter exhaustion of her life. Almost all of her 31 years had been spent like this. Catching up, cleaning up, covering up. If she couldn’t save her own mother and father, what did it matter if she let a man she hardly knew die?

But this was only a moment of weariness. She wouldn’t abandon Matthew.

She reached for the body, the thing, she knew so terribly well.

Her sister.

Its skin wasn’t really skin, but thousands and thousands of tiny gray scales, linked so tightly they became a natural armor. Impervious to blades and bullets, a fact her father and mother had tested that awful, final night. The scales felt like sandpaper to the touch, but rougher, so even grappling with Adelaide’s sister could make a person, any person, bleed.

Except Adelaide.

Ever since she was a child Adelaide could grip her sister’s scales and come away unscathed. Even their mother hadn’t been so lucky. Breastfeeding had been a short-lived experiment. Adelaide was sturdy enough to yoke the creature, the only living thing in the world who could restrain it. Their father once said that nature had designed Adelaide, their surprise second child, for this righteous purpose, to be a kind of living leash.

Now she flung back the covers and went after her sister as a veteran rodeo rider might approach a bull. Except Adelaide didn’t need the aid of a flank strap to make her sister buck and jump. Adelaide squeezed the throat with one arm and pulled backward with all her weight. Her father had often blessed the fact that Adelaide had been born so strong, wide from the shoulders to the hips. One more proof, to her parents, as to her purpose. She had the mass to peel her sister away from Matthew Kirby and to twist the massive head.

Her sister’s legs were short and thin, a trait they both shared, so she buckled when Adelaide pressed all her body weight down. But with the head turned there were the teeth to contend with. The teeth. When Adelaide was young there had been so many times when she let her arm stray too high, too close to her sister’s maw. Those dimpled scars on Adelaide’s forearms were the proof of all her practice.

With her sister turned away from Matthew, Adelaide climbed higher onto her sister’s back. It was like scaling a pterodactyl. Adelaide’s sister crashed forward, onto her softer belly, cracking some of the floorboards beneath them. But now the head was flush against the ground and this was the trick Adelaide had figured long ago. Monstrous or not, her sister’s jaw still worked like any human being’s, biting was done by movement of the lower jaw, not the upper. If the lower jaw was pressed to the ground and 180 pounds of Adelaide lay against the back of the head, well, that head wasn’t coming up. She’d learned this trick after watching alligator wrestlers in a traveling show.

He sister sputtered and snorted but Adelaide held her down.

Adelaide looked back to Matthew. Hard to tell, in the darkness, if he’d lost any limbs. She heard him choking and coughing so she knew he still had a head. Better than how she’d found her mother.

“Can you hear me?” she asked him between heaving breaths.

More coughing. Was he nodding or suffering a spasm?

“How did Elizabeth get out?” Adelaide asked. “Did she break the padlocks?”

Her sister hissed and belched, and through her clenched teeth she brought up a spray of blood that soaked the floor.

Matthew’s blood.

Adelaide had worked so hard to get her sister into the steamer trunk back at the farmhouse. If she’d done it once in Redondo then she could do it again now. She wrestled her sister forward, pushing Elizabeth toward the trunk while keeping one hand against the back of the head so the jaws wouldn’t lift from the floor.

And now her sister, seeing the trunk, gave a choked wail. It looked like an open casket. Elizabeth would be buried alive again. This was the worst part for Adelaide. The physical strain was terrible, of course, but this noise felt worse. A kind of sobbing that might last for hours once Elizabeth got locked back in.

When Adelaide was very young she had trouble sleeping because her parents kept her sister on a short chain in the barn behind their farmhouse. Her sister might wail throughout the night or she might simply whimper and go to sleep right away. There was no predicting it. Her father had learned to sleep through the worst of the bawling and her mother would sit up all night reading the Bible, not for solace but to remind herself that demons had always roamed the world. And Adelaide would sit at her bedroom window looking out at the barn. By the time she was seven she understood that when her parents were gone responsibility for Elizabeth would fall to her. It was like knowing a drop off a cliff was in the future but never being sure of where or when it would come.

Matthew Kirby fell forward at the waist like a child still learning to sit upright. Adelaide couldn’t look back at him right then; she and her sister were at the trunk and this was the trickiest part. Adelaide reached for one of her sister’s arms and pulled it backward until her sister shivered and gulped with pain. Now Adelaide sang, trying to keep her voice gentle even though she huffed from the exertion.

“
Your mother wants you to sleep. Your father wants you to sleep.
”

Elizabeth whimpered, the vigor seeped out of her frame. Adelaide’s sister had spent most of her 40 years in chains, stuffed into root cellars, locked inside a barn. She was used to it. Conditioned. Perhaps she didn’t even realize there was any such thing as freedom. It was the captivity, at her family’s hands, that was normal, and breaking loose as rare as a good dream.

“
Your sister wants you to sleep, to sleep. Now it’s time to sleep.
”

Elizabeth climbed inside. As Adelaide closed the lid they looked into each other’s eyes. Both sisters held back tears.

Adelaide closed the lid and found all three padlocks on the ground. She held them up for inspection. They weren’t broken open.

They’d been unlocked.

Her three keys no longer hung on a nail by the stove but were on the ground, right here, by the trunk.

“You opened this,” Adelaide said quietly.

When she looked back Matthew was propped against the overturned great chair. He held his rifle at his waist – the rifle she thought he’d left outside. The barrel was aimed at her.

“Move aside,” Matthew said, though his voice was weak. “And I’ll kill it.”

Adelaide slipped the padlocks back into their slots. Inside the trunk her sister sniffled. “You opened this,” Adelaide repeated.

“Only thing in here that’s all locked up,” he said, the rifle barrel quivering with the weight. He held the rifle in his left arm but he was right handed. His right arm was tucked against his side, the sleeve of his shirt sagged loosely up by the shoulder. But then Adelaide realized that he was just as naked as she, and the sagging fabric was actually his skin practically falling off the bone.

“How did I sleep through all this?”

He stayed quiet a little while but finally said, “Laudanum. In your tea.” Another pause. “I just wanted to see what was inside the trunk.”

“You wanted to see what you could take.”

He shook his head stiffly. “Call me a thief, but you’ve got a devil in your home.”

Adelaide wasn’t even angry with him. Not truly. Every man and woman out here, every child and even every beast, was well acquainted with desperation. He’d thought to pilfer her treasure but found only her curse hiding in there.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Let me help you so you don’t die.”

The rifle dipped down, as if it was nodding off and not him, but rose once more.

“Will it get out again?” he asked.