The Shore (16 page)

Tiny shuddered with his whole body and peeled himself up, and when she felt his body lift up off her Ellie scrambled to get her feet under her. Bo socked her in the middle of the back, and you could hear all her breath go out as she hit the floor, facedown. Then he was on top of her. This time she made a noise, a popping gasp as she tried to breathe with all of Bo's weight crushing down on her. He grunted and pounded into her with his whole body, like he was trying to go through the floor, or break her hips. Maybe he was. She scraped at the floor with her fingernails, and he pinned her wrists down, crushing them into the boards. He finished with a growl, suddenly, abruptly, and ground her body beneath him before pulling away. Blood smeared his shrinking cock, and he wiped it away with the tail of his shirt as he stood up.

“Your turn,” Bo said, and I realized he meant me. She'd curled into a half-moon when he got off her, like a pill bug when you move its rock. I put my Mason jar down on the crate and moved toward her, slowly, like moving through a mass of throbbing cotton. It was a long way down onto the floor, but I wished it were longer. I stayed kneeling over her for a second so my head could stop spinning, but she didn't seem to notice I was there. Bo had knocked the wind out of her, probably.

Pressed together like that her breasts were even more like peaches, the white ones that are so sweet they make your teeth hurt, and I realized that I'd been looking at them out of the tail
of my eye since I'd first met her. My hand came up on its own, and through the booze her breast felt like a peach too, soft and firm at once and slightly downy. When my hand touched her it was like she suddenly woke up. Her head snapped back, and she looked straight up into my eyes.

“Jake. Please don't do this.” So quiet I probably imagined it. She wasn't moving now at all, just her chest rattling up and down. Those eyes looked right through me, asking me to do something I didn't know how to do in a language I didn't understand. I turned her over so I wouldn't have to see them.

I hadn't been that close to a woman, I realized, in months. I could feel the heat rising off of her; smell the warm bittersweet saltiness of her skin, tempered by the coppery cut of blood. Her long, curly hair had spread out on the floor in a puddle, and I pressed my hand into it to feel the springiness. All that hair. Like having an entire chocolate cake to myself. I lowered my face into it, and smelled her shampoo, something fruity. It warmed a spot in my belly, and all my muscles softened up until I was lying on top of her, cupped around her, breathing her in. For a moment I pressed myself against her to feel how warm and firm her body was under me, how curvy, and all I could think was Iwant Iwant Iwant.

Then I pulled myself slowly back up. Tiny made a derisive sound.

“Be a man,” he brayed.

“Whiskey dick,” I said. “I couldn't ‘be a man' with a gun to my head.” I stumbled back to the table and drained my drink.

Bo hitched up his jeans, then walked over to her and kicked her lightly in the side, to make sure he had her attention. “Say a thing to Chick or anyone about this and I'll tear you apart.” I'd
expected him to start in on her the way he usually did, but his voice was really quiet. Calm. Dangerous. “He wouldn't believe a word of it, anyway. Stupid bitch. Should've known better than to come here dressed like that, hey? Like dangling a bone in front of a dog. You only did it to show me what I couldn't have.” He leaned over her, took a handful of her hair and turned her head so she had to look at him. “What just happened is your own damn fault. You were begging for it.” He let her head drop. “Keep your mouth shut, or else.”

He stood and turned for the door, Tiny after him. I hesitated a moment, looked back. Ellie was just lying there, not moving, not crying, and for a moment I wondered if she was dead. Then Bo called for me to hurry up, and I followed them down.

Monday morning when I got there, Chick, Tiny, and Bo were all pulling out the downstairs windows to swap them out for double-glazed, weatherproof ones. I got nervous as hell, then I saw her on her knees in a corner of the kitchen, rewiring one of the bathroom wall sockets, the one that shocked Bo on Friday.

“Was thinking you weren't showing up,” Chick called. “That wild a weekend?” I went over toward Ellie. She wouldn't look up at me, even though my feet were inches from her knees. I nudged her, just a little. She wouldn't look up at all.

“Just cards, that's all,” I answered Chick. “Same thing we always do.”

1885

M
ANY
W
ATERS

T
he sun was in Medora's eye. If she hadn't just gotten her pipe lit she would have moved out of the beam, but the act of dropping the smoldering bit of punk she had used into the clay dish by her side, of laying her arm across her chest, of stilling her entire body until she could feel her heart beating in the rush mat against her back, had made movement impossible. She was wood, like the floor beneath her.

The beam fell through the gap in the rush roof where her pipe smoke crowded before slipping out, and she squinted to watch it swirl, drew deeply and let the gentle plume rise from between her lips. It was an unladylike habit, and when she was still living at home she had only indulged in private. Since her leaving, the pipe had rarely left her hand; the smoke deadened the pain in her body and mind alike.

Her pipe was similar in shape to the one that had been clenched between her mother's teeth whenever she sat outside the kitchen door, cross-legged and rocklike, waiting for her daughter to appear. What Medora had then taken for apathy on her mother's part she now realized was a pained patience, a willingness to wait forever so long as she might catch a glimpse of
her child. Smoking helped with that sort of waiting, offered a calmness, made her feel loose and far away from her body—her burns had healed to a waxy smoothness and no longer troubled her, but her bones still ached where joints had been wrenched out of place and breaks knitted roughly and it had taken her some time to adjust to having the use of only one eye.

She had learned recently that there had always been Indian women living in the marshes on the edge of Accomack Island, trading herbs and advice to the sharecroppers and smallholders too poor for a doctor. Like the Shore was part of Virginia, the Accawmacke were part—or had been part—of the Powhatan Confederation, spoke Algonquin and offered yearly tribute to their emperor across the water. But the Chesapeake was so large and the island so remote that the Powhatan left the Accawmacke mostly to their own governance, just as the rest of Virginia left the farmers and tradesmen to their marshy backwater.

They had called her “ma'am” before, and the title had never felt comfortable to her; now they called her “Aunty,” and that felt more right. Even when they had called her ma'am she had had a reputation, had known much, occupied herself with herbs and simples. Her cook had joked that the poor folk already thought her half a witch. Then her husband had made her over to look the part. It was Nittawasew, though, who had completed the transformation, who had found her wandering in the marsh and knitted her back together, taught her the use of the local plants that she didn't recognize, helped her make a place for herself.

Over the sound of the wind through the marsh grass she could hear tentative, sucking footsteps, and she gathered her faculties. She felt too young, too inexperienced, for the trust that people put in her—at twenty-seven she guessed that she
was the youngest healer they had ever had—and she compensated for her self-doubt by playing the role as best she could, by imitating Nittawasew. It wasn't so hard; she already felt old. The scars bothered people, she knew, and even though she hated them she liked how they kept her visitors off-balance, unsure whether they should avert their eyes or pretend that she looked normal. As the footsteps drew closer she let herself sink more leadenly into the mat: Nittawasew never jumped for anyone.

“Aunt Medora? You t'home?” Ruby knew she was there; it was just a politeness to ask. Medora opened her eye and looked up at the girl who was sticking her head through the door of the hut and slapping at mosquitoes.

“No, child, I'm swimming with the pelicans. I just left my body behind to mind the house.”

“Yes, Aunty.” The hut was on stilts to raise it above high tide, and barely large enough to fit both of them. Ruby pulled herself up onto its warped board floor and crouched in the doorway, the old horse blanket pinned across the opening draping over her shoulders like a cape.

“You're needing something, then?”

“I'm late again, Aunt Medora. Just a few days, but I can't take no chances right now.”

Medora clenched the pipe in her teeth and sat up. Ruby's husband owned a tiny patch of boggy land out near Greenbackville, on the northwest coast, where, from the look of things, they raised weeds and babies. The woman wasn't many years younger than herself, Medora guessed, but she had seven children, spaced like porch steps, each running up the heels of the one before. She was a pretty girl, her light eyes shocking in contrast with her rich reddish-brown skin, short body curved like a
classical Venus: Medora had heard comment to the effect that if Ruby's husband hadn't kept her pregnant there'd have been no shortage of volunteers to do so.

She could reach her medicine chest from where she sat, but stretching for it would have been undignified. Instead she pulled herself painfully to her feet, with only a little exaggeration, and knelt in front of it with her back squarely to Ruby. It was made of dark wood, the only real furniture in the hut. Her sleeping mat and gathering basket she had woven herself out of rushes, her one iron pot sat on its stubby legs in a corner with her knife and spoon and horn cup inside it, and the two clay dishes she'd gotten in trade stacked next to it. If she looked down she could see between the boards to where the fiddler crabs scuttled across the black mud, and the walls were woven of green switches; it was more an inverted basket than a house. But it was only meant for summer residence, a place for her to be private. She had bargained the stilts and platform out of some of the freeholders, an afternoon's work, and built up the walls and covered the roof herself.

“How old's the youngest?” she asked as she sorted through the contents of the chest.
M. piperita
,
Hypericum perforatum
,
Hydrastis canadensis.
She was running low on ramson bulbs. Dried herbs were kept bundled and wrapped in greased paper in muslin pouches, tinctures in corked black bottles, salves in small pots. Much of it had come with her, first from her father's house and then again from the wide plantation house that Andrew had built for them, overlooking the creeks and the sea; recently she had added preparations of indigenous plants that her books had not taught her about, preparations specific to women's medicine.

“Not quite a year, ma'am. Milk dried up two months ago—my sister's been fostering her since.”

Medora grumbled to herself as she rifled through the chest. You'd think men would learn to be a little more circumspect, at the very least keep their hands to themselves if they wouldn't shoulder more of the housework. Near the bottom she found what she was looking for, twisted up in brown paper and wrapped in unbleached muslin.

“Listen close, then, and do exactly what I tell you. This—” she turned the woman's left hand palm-up and closed it around one of the packets—“is the last of my pennyroyal. Make a tea of it, and drink four cups a day for five days, spaced out even as you can.” She put a similar packet in the woman's other hand. “This is cotton-root bark. Boil what I've given you in a pot so big—” she indicated with her hands—“until the liquid is halved, then sip a small cup, warm, every hour. Get up in the night if you can. Those two together should do the trick. If your blood doesn't come in five days, come back to me and I'll see what else we can do.”

Ruby nodded, and slipped the packets into the pockets of her skirt.

“Is there anything else I can do, to help it along?” she asked.

“Pick some raspberry leaves as you're walking home, and when the blood comes make a tea of them. Nettle tea is good too. Take what I've given you as regular as possible, but don't get nervous and take more than I've said.”

Medora had her repeat back the instructions twice, to be sure. She'd been told about girls, mostly scared, unmarried girls, who had died from taking more than they'd been told to.

“I haven't got no money, Aunt Medora,” Ruby admitted at the end of the second recitation.

“Didn't think you did,” Medora conceded.

“Got some potatoes and collards I can bring tomorrow.”

“I can get all the greens and potatoes I need myself, thank you.” Medora settled cross-legged on her mat, tucked the fraying ends of her blue skirt around her, and sucked her pipe. This was the part she didn't like. She needed the payment, but she hated bargaining for it.

“Yes, ma'am, didn't mean to offend. I can bring half a pound of salt pork without my man noticing, or I've got a petticoat from my sister what's too long. And I've got news about Mister Day you'd most likely want to hear.”

Medora's stomach knotted at the name, but she sat still as a rock.

“All right then. What's this news?”

“People's been saying he's set to marry his girl, Gracie Cole.”

“Not if he's got a wife, he isn't,” she snapped.

“If a judge says his wife is dead, then he's got no wife.” Ruby was hesitant, as if she expected to have the herbs taken from her if Medora didn't like the news. “And with his money, if he wanted he could have the whole of Virginia saying the sky was green by dinnertime. They might probably be waiting till end of harvest—girl like that's going to want an awful lot of lace in her married clothes.”

“Thank you, Ruby. If I can, I'll come for that bit of pork tomorrow.” She lay back again, ramrod stiff, and drew deeply on her pipe. The woman mumbled a goodbye, and Medora listened
to her slow, sucking footsteps as she made her way carefully to drier ground.

Rage was boiling her stomach, and she breathed deeply to calm it. She had underestimated Andrew Day, perhaps, and she was lucky to have survived the mistake. They had invested the money well, built up their farm until Andrew was one of the richest men on the island, and she had to admit that she wouldn't have been able to do so on her own, a woman and half-Indian besides. But it was her cunning that had gotten the money in the first place, and even though he called himself her husband, played the part quite well in public, it was only the bit of paper with their signatures on it that permitted him to manage her money. She would laugh if their marriage were ever exposed as a sham, but he would never lift his face again. Without her, he would have ended in prison, a two-bit con man without the sense to put together a passable story.

She would not let him get away with this.

She still dreamed, nearly a year later, of the intense heat, saw leaping flames and cried out in her sleep, smelled her hair and her skirts burning. The left side of her face and neck, her ear and a large patch of her hair had burned. Her corset had saved her breasts and belly, but her legs had been scorched and blistered in patches, and what of her left sleeve had not burned entirely had adhered itself to the raw flesh.

She had thought that she was going to die, felt that she was still burning as she fled the house. She had no doubt that he had, in the moment, fully intended to kill her, to hold her there
in the fire until she stopped breathing. Fear mobilized her, pain blinded her, and when she finally collapsed she was lost on the edge of the marsh.

And there Nittawasew had found her.

Her nation had long been fractured, their numbers reduced by illness and the violence of invaders, their remaining members integrated with the settlers or living privately in the places where no one else dared go. No one knew how old she was, but Nittawasew reigned over a tribe of children and grandchildren, and had the trust of the poor and the laborers. One of her granddaughters worked in Medora's kitchen, had heard their shouting and had seen her run from the house, had tracked her on her erratic path through the marsh, and had brought the old woman to tend her when she fell. Medora did not know this; to her, Nittawasew had found her through magic.

She had woken eight days later, in a longhouse on one of the barrier islands, and wondered why she couldn't open her left eye. At first she had assumed that she was dreaming, or had died and rejoined her mother: she was surrounded by native and half-native women, speaking quietly in a language she did not understand, feeding infants and doing handwork, their talk not quite drowning out the rattle of rain on the woven rush roof.

The burns, once treated, had healed cleanly, though her left eye had sealed with scar tissue and could not be opened; the wrist that had broken when she caught herself falling, the shoulder that had come out of its socket, took longer. Her mind had taken longest of all.

At first she had sat with them, not speaking and not responding, barely thinking even, lost in a pain that she couldn't identify as being in her body or in her head. The old woman had
pulled her out of herself, given her a mortar and commanded her to grind the herbs for her own poultices, showed her catnip and cannabis leaves and told her what they could be used for, took her out into the marsh to search for plants to stock her pharmacopeia. Medora was interested in spite of herself; most of her knowledge came from European texts, written by men, and focused on European plants and the illnesses and ailments of men. Calley had added to her knowledge somewhat, but many of the plants on the Shore she had not seen used before, and she knew only the basics of women's medicine. She watched as three babies were birthed that fall, and as dozens of others were prevented, and learned all that the older woman was willing to teach her.

The other women came and went as they pleased, sometimes returning with news for her. Andrew had called in the doctor for his scorched hand, told the man that it had happened in pulling her from the flames, showed him the patch of floor on which she'd extinguished her clothing. His wife had thrown herself into the fire during an argument, had run from the house so badly burned that she could not survive, and when they searched but found no body, she had been declared dead. She gritted her teeth at this; in fighting against him she had given the man exactly what he wanted, both her fortune and the opportunity to marry someone more appropriate, to go back to the mainland and high society with a suitable wife on his arm.