Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (59 page)

Looking away from her sister was what led Adelaide to glance out the nearest window. The lace curtains were closed but Adelaide could clearly make out one of the Mudge boys standing right there on the other side. She hadn’t heard anything. Just like that he appeared. Her lamp had nearly died out so she sat in shadows.

The Mudge boy went up on his toes.

No bandana over the eyes.

“Looks empty,” the boy said.

His mother’s voice hissed back. “Then why is there a gelding out front?”

Adelaide stayed in her seat. Elizabeth remained on the floor, lapping lazily.

Then a loud knock. “Mrs. Henry, please open your door.”

Elizabeth stirred. Snorting softly and opening one eye. She looked up at her sister.

“Should I call you Mudge or Morrison?”

As soon as Adelaide spoke, sounding tense, Elizabeth lifted her head, alert.

“You know my name,” Mrs. Mudge said. “Let me show you my pistol.”

Elizabeth rose up on all fours. Her great, gray back stiffened. Adelaide stood and Elizabeth circled her legs protectively.

“I see her!” shouted the youngest. He stood at another window, high up, riding on the eldest brother’s shoulders. They were treating this like a game.

“I think she’s got a dog,” the six-year-old added. “I want it.”

“What happened to the blindfolds?” Adelaide shouted to Mrs. Mudge.

“Tell me what you remember about my boys? Height? Hair color? Accents? Or just a couple of blindfolds?” Mrs. Mudge laughed with satisfaction.

Now a new sound. Rain splashing the windows.

Not rain.

The Mudge boys had all opened their trousers. They were peeing on Adelaide’s windows. The youngest, the six-year-old, had come down off his brother’s shoulders. Adelaide couldn’t see him but she heard him shout.

“I’m making on her wall!”

This is our house,
Adelaide thought.
Those boys are defiling our
home.

“If you were anyone else we would’ve just gone off with your horse,” Mrs. Mudge said. “But you and that big Mr. Olsen were privy to some details I prefer to keep private. We already had a talk with him.”

Elizabeth watched the front door with a slavering intensity. Her lower jaw hung open, saliva dribbled down onto the floor. Her teeth gleamed whiter than a full moon, each one sharper than any blade. Adelaide grabbed her sister by the back of the neck and led her toward the front door.

“You boys will be sure to bury this one deep in the snow, you hear? Like the wagon driver.”

The boys shouted back as one as they buttoned their slacks. “Yes, ma’am!”

Adelaide opened the front door to find Mrs. Mudge wearing a grin. But then Mrs. Mudge saw Elizabeth.

“Oh my,” she said.

Elizabeth leapt out and tore off Mrs. Mudge’s left arm.

All four boys scrambled around the cabin to find Elizabeth crouching over their mother, a beast guarding its kill.

In that instant Adelaide saw them as they truly were. Four boys. 17, 16, 10, and 6. Blood ran from their mother’s shoulder like oil erupting from a well..

Mrs. Mudge panted. Her eyes swam wild in their sockets. Her lips moved but she addressed no one. The two youngest couldn’t look away from their mother. They didn’t cry or scream. But the older boys recovered more quickly. And what did they do?

They ran.

Left their two young brothers there. Sprinted to where the Mudges had tied up two horses. The two youngest only looked to the eldest brother when he was already on his horse.

“Edward!” they shouted.

Edward rode away.

The second oldest followed. They rode north and in seconds disappeared into the cavernous gloom of Montana night. The rumble of the horse’s hooves was all that remained.

Elizabeth barked once. She rose onto her legs – hard not to think of them as hind legs – and spread her arms. The loose skin under there expanded like sails being let out. That unstoppable Montana wind gathered in Elizabeth’s loose skin and when she snapped her arms down she shot up, into the sky.

Elizabeth Henry took flight.

Adelaide watched with as much shock as the two little Mudge boys. She hadn’t know her sister could fly.

Elizabeth’s barking echoed. It came from farther north. Another bark then a horse whined and snorted as it went down somewhere out there. A young man’s voice called out once –
Edward!
– but was quickly silenced. Only one horse galloping now. There were two pistol shots. Then silence.

Adelaide came back to herself. She’d been so busy listening to the darkness that she’d stopped seeing what lay in front of her. Mrs. Mudge. The body not yet cold, but the soul already gone.

The remaining Mudge boys had split. They’d mounted Mrs. Barlow’s gelding together. Adelaide watched them ride to her. The 10-year-old held the reins. His younger brother in front. They stopped at Adelaide’s door. The boys looked at their mother then back to Adelaide. The 10-year-old’s eyes showed bright with rage, but it was the gaze of the 6-year old that chilled Adelaide. He watched her with a dispassionate eye, colder than a Montana winter.

“Mudges never forget,” the 6-year-old said.

His brother gave the gelding a kick and the two boys stole off on Mrs. Barlow’s horse.

First winter was the hardest test for any homesteader. First spring counted as the hardest after that. Eventually summer and fall would challenge the homesteader, too. And if you survived the first year, then the second loomed. After the third the land was legally yours. Many homesteaders, once they owned the property outright, returned to their home state and sold the land for profit. Others managed their resources and stuck around.

Adelaide and Elizabeth emerged from that first winter to find that by May the land had thawed back to its raw grace. They’d almost forgotten what the world looked like without its shroud of snow. Adelaide took Mrs. Barlow – Violette, as Adelaide called her now – up on the offer of help to secure a bank loan, and used some of the money to buy a gelding that Adelaide named Redondo.

A plow and harrow had been the next. Adelaide picked up an ax and hoe, rake and flail. She bought a four-burner stove with an oven so she could cook larger meals. She bought a rifle. She repaid Mrs. Barlow for the gelding the Mudge boys took. With the start of spring Adelaide planned to hire a man to come out and build a small barn but Grace and the other women built one for her. It rained nearly every day so this was soggy work.

None of the women would let Adelaide do much because she was eight months pregnant. She’d been wrong, thinking she’d never see Matthew Kirby again. She wondered whether the child would have his face, his hair, his shy smile.

Elizabeth stayed hidden in the root cellar when the barn was built. She never slept inside the trunk again. Adelaide used it to hold the baby clothes she’d sewn.

Grace and Stan were last to leave after the barn was complete.

“How’re you going to break the soil up with Redondo?” Grace asked. Stan, now six, held the reins of their horse and snuck bits of beet into its mouth.

“I’m going to get the plow on him,” Adelaide said. “Then after we’re done I’ll use the harrow.”

Adelaide tried to sound confident but at eight months pregnant she didn’t feel like much more than dead weight.

“I think you could guide the plow, even now,” Grace agreed. “But you can’t control your horse and slip that heavy thing on him. Let us stay.”

Stan pulled at the reins and the horse tugged back. The boy stumbled and dropped the beets in the dirt. He bent quick to snatch them, looking to his mother with worry. Grace must’ve warned him against this, for her own reasons, but now the boy brought himself within inches of the horse’s hooves. He stood exactly where Mrs. Mudge’s body had bled out..

“Be careful there, Stan!” Adelaide said quickly.

Grace turned fast and swatted her son, and he fell backward onto his ass. The horse was a good one; it stayed calm. Stan held his head and cried out, overplaying his pain.

“That’s what you have to look forward to, Adelaide.” Grace smiled. “Lots of theater.”

Adelaide touched Grace’s shoulder gently. “I appreciate your offer. Ride over on Wednesday. I’ll let you know if I need help.”

Grace agreed with a grunt and helped Stan onto the horse. Grace’s hand never had healed properly and she had enough trouble tending to her own land because of it. Adelaide didn’t want to add to Grace’s burden even if she had no idea how she’d manage plowing on her own.

Adelaide let her sister out of the root cellar when Grace and Stan were blotted out by the distance. For dinner Adelaide made rabbit, mountain cottontail. Elizabeth had turned out to be a talented hunter.

In the morning Adelaide woke to the sound of her barn doors rattling open. By this point in her pregnancy she couldn’t sleep deeply and her mind felt fuzzier than a mossy stone. She was too tired, too dazed, to act immediately. Instead she listened to the sound of something heavy being dragged from the barn. She wondered if the Mudge boys were back –
Mudges never forget –
stealing her equipment.

She sat up with some trouble. Elizabeth wasn’t inside. Maybe off hunting, patrolling the sky. Adelaide retrieved her rifle and looked out a window. She laughed at what she saw.

Elizabeth on all fours in the dirt and growling with intent. She had pulled the plow out of the barn and slipped her head through the harness.

Adelaide hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet, but these days she had a hard time keeping anything down. It was a sunny morning. A Montana homesteader should always take advantage of a morning without rain. Adelaide stepped back in for her coat and scarf and hat. She set down the rifle. She walked out to the plow. Her belly pressed against the high bar between the handles. Elizabeth tested the harness with a pull.

“I’m ready, Elizabeth!” Adelaide shouted.

The Henry sisters got to work.

Art by GMB Chomichuk

1524
Guatemala

I dream in shades of green. The dusty hue of swallow herb; the new growth of little hand flower; the deep forest shade of cat’s claw. Plants are my calling and, as in waking life, they sprawl across boundaries.

The old woman dreams of deaths to come.

I wake to the sound of little explosions – ta-ta-ra-ta-ta – of copal cast into flame. When I come into my full power, the old woman will teach me the secret prayers, the ones only our kind intone because none other have such need to see under and beyond the world.

Perhaps the priests do too, but theirs is a much different calling. Though the incense that carries our prayers up to the heart of heaven is the same as the one they use, the words given flight are not.

I rise from the mat, secure my skirt with a sash, and pull my tunic over it so only a few inches of skirt shows above my ankles. I sing the names of my ancestors as I weave a ribbon through my braids: Names like vines that twist through leaf and branch; names like bits of cloud caught on the fingers of trees; names like the sound of air displaced by a bird’s wing.

It is nobody’s ritual but my own to sing this litany, but I – granddaughter, great-granddaughter, blood heir to generations – use the names to knit my bones more solidly to my flesh with each rising.

Every day of every year I’ve been with the old woman has started this way.

When I come out of the house, the old woman doesn’t even turn around. She’s on her heels by the fire pit, dropping copal into it. The smoke rises heavy above her head, then spreads wide instead of up.

“I noticed we’re almost out of snake’s broom,” she says to me, without looking around. “And thunderer root. And chicken herb.”

“Won’t we be preparing achiotl today?” I ask hopefully. We haven’t yet gotten the call for it but the old woman has assured me we will.

She looks at me then. I know she’s irritated at me by the way her crossed eye moves even closer to the inner corner. “Yes. But preparing for war doesn’t mean the people won’t run fevers, or bleed, or give birth.”

She gets up and comes to stand next to me. She’s not much taller than me, for all that I’m only twelve and she’s lived years beyond my counting. “The Sun will soon show his face,” she says as she takes the cloth folded on her head and places it on mine. She adjusts it so the stiffest fold overhangs my eyes. Its shadow will keep them from watering.

I prefer to go bareheaded but the old woman’s gift is not to be ignored. She doesn’t need to mention again that she has foreseen people from other towns passing through our lands on their way to Utatlán. The people from our village are used to the way I look, but if these others chance to see me their eyes will slide over my white skin and white hair and freeze on my pink eyes.

Curses are passed along through prolonged eye contact. And fright, which is hard to treat and sometimes fatal.

The old woman is not my mother. She is not my grandmother, nor any relation that can be traced in straight lines. But the tree of life has crooked lines too, and her crossed eyes and my ghostly appearance tie us together in more worlds than just the one under our feet. My father brought me to her still tinted dark by my mother’s blood, but the old woman knew me anyway. The gods have made us family.