The Shore (10 page)

That night, she slipped out onto the front lawn, down the path lined with crepe myrtle, to her father's personal stables, her nightgown pooling and drifting around her like a mist. She touched her fingers to the nameplate on each rough door as she passed: Aise, Coco, Mayfly, Lapis, until she came to Mercury's stall.

He towered above her as she led him out, past the tobacco fields, down under the pecan trees, toward where her father's working horses were kept. The long stable, the corral and the exercise track, the small millpond, all glowed silver in the darkness. His skin was hot, and she led him gently into one of the sets of stocks and looped his halter around its thick wooden frame so that she could strip off her nightgown. The knife was where she had left it, high in the fork of the nearest tree. For a moment she considered him: huge and perfect, the smooth nap of his skin like darkly glowing velvet, his eyes gleaming wetly at her in the dim light.

Her father loved this horse. Every morning, before his breakfast julep, he strolled down to the stables, stroked Mercury's cheeks and kissed his velvet nose, walked him through the early mist, oversaw his feeding. He had made a bed in the stallion's stall and nursed him through a fever the previous year, and when he had stumbled back to his feet after days of dull half-consciousness her father had broken into silent tears. They had pranced together at her side when her father forced her onto Lapis in the hope of making her a horsewoman, and though she had learned to ride almost as well as he did she did not find with any of the horses the bond her father had with Mercury. She
doubted that many men found with their wives the bond he had with Mercury.

She reached up to stroke his flank, felt for a moment the pulse and tremble beneath his skin, the sheer aliveness of him, and she couldn't do it. Then she pictured her father flinging her mother down the kitchen steps, and the way he had come at her so many times through her childhood and adolescence. She raised the knife.

Hot blood sprayed her arms, sticky and viscous. She didn't know if the sounds she heard were from the horse, or in her own ears. He bucked, pranced, tried to kick in the tight space of the stocks, then stilled.

They were soft in her hands, and much larger than she'd expected, even though many times before she'd watched the field hands gelding horses, bulls, sometimes smaller animals for the sake of practice or boredom. For a moment she considered taking his cock too, but dismissed the idea: it would require teasing the organ out of its deep sheath, and though she knew she could, she doubted Mercury would cooperate now. And he might bleed to death from that.

He had already stopped bleeding, and she watched as the last few drops splashed into the dust beneath him. She was drenched in sweat, though the night was cool, and shaking, and she left him in the stocks to throw herself into the millpond on the far side of the stables. She laved the water over her hands and arms, rubbing at the congealed blood until it melted away, and emerged dripping.

The shift clung to her skin as she carefully led Mercury out of the stocks, up the path, and back to his own stall. She stabbed the knife deep into a bale of hay, then pried one of the nails from the wall of the small storage room at the end of the stable. With a rock, she pounded it through the velvet skin of the horse's scrotum, into the wooden nameplate on the door of the stall, pinning his testicles where her father would be certain to see them. She retrieved the knife and walked slowly back to the house, and suddenly she felt as though she could sleep where she stood.

They were at breakfast when the explosion came. She was bent low over a boiled egg, hunkered down, expecting it. Andrew was more upright, unaware: she hadn't bothered to tell him, it was her private revenge. It began with a rustle in the hall, and voices, and became a slamming and a shout as her father exploded into the room and caught her up. Her chair went over behind her, the back cracked in two as it hit the floor.

“You whore! You she-devil! What have you done?” He shook her by the arm, but she hung inert, eyes unfocused over his right shoulder. Andrew sat silent at first, but when her father struck her across the face he started up, more in shock than outrage.

“You shall not treat my fiancée in this manner!” he thundered, and her father threw her back against the wall.

“The more luck for her she is your fiancée, or else I'd tear her limb from limb and stake her out in the field for the crows. Get the wretch out of my house, let me never hear her name again!”

Medora gathered herself up, straightened her clothing, then
went to retrieve the case she had packed the night before. When she came back down her father had sunk into a wing-backed chair, silent, his face set and stony, the muscles in his jaw jumping; he did not speak or look up at her as she passed, and to Andrew he addressed the curtest of farewells.

Once out of her father's hearing range she instructed the stableboy who had followed him into the house to hitch up the gig, and he hesitated only for a moment before obliging. The drive out to the railroad station was unmarred by speech, but once the boy had left them Andrew breached the silence.

“Forgive me, but I do not remember our plans for egress involving any forays into gelding, amateur or otherwise.”

She did not reply, only looked at him, openly and directly, until he finally looked away in discomfort. He did not bring the matter up again.

They rode the train to Frankfort, disembarked in a light shower and went directly to the tiny room, let out by a deaf older woman but near the railroad station, that Andrew had arranged for them. And then there was nothing to do but wait.

For Medora it was an alien, almost surreal, experience. At home her wallpaper had been peeling, but here the walls themselves were cracked, and insects scuttled in the dark corners and climbed behind the walls; even the air tasted unhealthy, and there were strange stains on the mattress. She had not realized before quite how rich her father was, how tidy Calley kept everything, and for the first week she could barely bring herself to touch anything in that room, even the floor. The filth, from the streets and the air and the people themselves, seemed to cling to her skin, so that she felt constantly dingy
and dreamed of her crisp white bedsheets and coppers full of boiling water and the freshness and quiet of first-thing-in-the-morning air. She couldn't imagine how such a press of people could tolerate living in a city, knowing that they would most likely never escape.

They had bought cheap silver bands at a pawnshop the day after they arrived in town, but every time Andrew broached the subject of marriage she put him off; the only thing that she could think of that might be worse than living with the man was relinquishing the right to leave him. The first night they slept on opposite sides of the bed, fully clothed, with their valises and the document case in a neat row between them. Medora assumed that they would continue as they had begun, but as the days of quiet waiting progressed, and the pennies in Andrew's ragged purse began to run out, he grew bolder.

She was not entirely lacking curiosity. She wondered what it was that drew women to men, what the fizzing in her belly would become if he ever did more than lay his hand on her clothed knee. But she had been raised well, at least in this. Calley had made sure of that. It was his role to press, and hers to protest, and for once she fulfilled her prescribed role. But every moment of it felt like acting, as though she were upon a stage for the benefit of a single audience member. They posed as husband and wife, and having her father's consent made them so close to being married that she didn't think it mattered that they weren't. He pressed, and she resisted, and his temper wore thin, until one afternoon he declared that if she didn't dispense with her sensibilities and stop acting like the well-bred woman he knew she wasn't he would use the rest of their money on whores
while she slept on the street. It was with mostly feigned reluctance that she gave in.

Immediately afterward she regretted it, and nearly told him to take himself and his whores to hell, but pride kept her from saying a word. Calley had been right in calling it “the wifely duty,” and for the first few days she couldn't see how it could be construed as anything else. Once she yielded it seemed that his hands were always on her, that she had given her unequivocal and nonretractable permission for him to enjoy her how and when he pleased. But after a few days, as she began to adjust both to the concept and the actuality, she found the ridiculous side to it, the humor of Andrew's urgency and concentration, and eventually she found herself enjoying it, even having fanciful daydreams of quiet cottages with deep, downy beds and soft, cuddly babies. There wasn't much else for them to do, and the waiting weighed heavy.

The telegram came some nine weeks after they fled the house; Andrew had been sure to send a letter to her father with their address as soon as they'd arrived in Frankfort, and the lawyer had found it in his office and notified them as next of kin. The old man had been found slumped over at his desk, the empty decanter fallen and smashed, apparently drunk into his grave as his physician had predicted. He had barely amended the will that he had made when he first inherited the property, not thinking that he would live forever by any stretch of the imagination, but giving little thought to his mortality or his dependents. There was the standard provision made for a hypothetical spouse, which he had not bothered to correct, with further directive given that the remains of the estate pass to his natural daughter—the wording made it extremely clear that this
was categorically to prevent any of his estranged family from making a claim, rather than through fondness or concern for Medora. She was slightly surprised, when it was read out to her, that this stung, just a little. She hadn't expected outpourings of affection, but she had thought she'd meant a touch more to him.

When the telegram arrived she sat for a long time on the edge of the bed in the rented room, staring out the window. He would have drunk himself to death sooner or later: a julep for breakfast, a bottle of wine at dinner, bourbon and water in the afternoon, and usually a full decanter between supper and sleep. The bourbon was kept in bottles in the cellar, rack upon rack of them, which were brought up a bottle at a time and decanted by Mose, the houseboy, as it was needed. The night before their expulsion, before her castration of Mercury, she had crept down to the cellar, blue glass vial of chloral hydrate in hand. She counted off the bottles, calculating from years of experience how long it would take her father to finish each one, and chose one that she guessed would be opened in two months. That it had not been sooner, she supposed, was fair indication that his rage over Mercury had been temporary. She had briefly considered dismembering the horse entirely and leaving the pieces for her father to find scattered across the front lawn. But this would have led to immediate disinheritance, if he hadn't killed her first. Though the gelding had enraged her father, had come against that which he most loved, it had not caused him to suffer any tangible loss. If Mercury had been one of her father's racehorses, a prize stud, rather than his personal mount, there would doubtless have been repercussions. That had been the one risky part of the plan, her father's reaction. But it seemed that she had played all of her cards right.

When they arrived at her father's house Medora closeted herself with the lawyer, emerging hours later with a carefully worded document and a smug smile. She would not marry Andrew, though she would continue to pose as his wife; if he wanted access to her money he could, if he wished, sign the agreement that she and the lawyer had drawn up, which would make him the official manager of her property and funds, otherwise he could test his luck and see how long he could remain in her good graces. He had not been happy, at first threatened to expose her for a murderess, but changed his mind when she reminded him that he would be charged as an accessory, and after a satisfying display of temper, he relented.

For the first time in her life Medora avoided Calley as best she could, and for the first time in her life the older woman offered up little more than a distant expression. In the week immediately following their return Medora had descended to the kitchen once, squeezed into her old spot near the hearth with her black mourning dress crumpled like an overly dramatic flower around her, tried for a moment of normality. Calley was taking an inventory of the entire kitchen, from the spice vials to the laundry cauldron, and did not acknowledge Medora's presence for twenty minutes. When Calley finally did look at her, Medora wished that she hadn't: the gaze was piercing, painful, conscious of all of her faults.

“Have you been using what I taught you?”

“Ma'am? Haven't needed to, ma'am, no one's been ill of late.”

“I don't mean that medicine. Do you remember what I taught you, about women's herbs? Have you been using it?”

Medora's bewilderment must have shown, because the woman sighed deeply and pressed her palm to her forehead, in
the attitude of a despairing saint. This type of displeasure was familiar, easier to bear, and Medora hunched forward on her chair and listened eagerly as Calley explained the alchemy of tansy, parsley, raspberry leaf tea, the black magic of a woman's body. The original lesson had come, most likely, when Medora was young enough to think that she would never need to know such things, could not understand why someone might want to prevent children from happening. Now there was an urgency to the recitation, a quiet desperation in Calley's gestures as she handed Medora packets of herbs to smell and touch. There was no margin between theory and practice now; Calley did not ask if they had been married in their absence, if the marriage or lack thereof had been consummated. In the end there was too much for Medora to remember, too many details that were vitally important, so Calley took some of the blank leaves of paper meant for the inventory, had her sit and copy out the instructions like a child in school, fold them small and slip them between her chemise and the skin of her belly; she did not need to say that they must be kept secret.