Asia sobs and kicks her feet. “No nap!” she tells Rosalie. “No nap! No nap!”
Rosalie pretends she hasn’t heard either one of them. She continues to wrestle with Asia. “Rosalie,” Mother says firmly. “You will go and get the mail.” She pauses so that the next sentence will sound like a concession. Father is not the only one in the family with a sense of dramatic timing. “You can take the dogs.”
The dogs are howling now—Howl, howl, howl, Rosalie thinks, because any child in this family can summon up a Shakespeare quote when needed. Screw your courage to the sticking place.
“I haven’t finished the biscuits yet,” Rosalie says.
“I can finish them.” Mother’s words are clipped and clear. At first she’d pretended Rosalie’s fearfulness would pass. When it didn’t, she’d tried to coax Rosalie out of it. “You used to love to play outside,” she’d say and, it’s quite true, Rosalie did. She used to love to play outside with Henry Byron.
She remembers wandering all over the farm, sometimes with other children, sometimes alone—into the dairy, the cider press, the barn, the murk of the forest, the edge of the marsh. She’d walked on paths her father told her the Algonquin Indians had made, and brought home arrowheads and tomahawks. She remembers these things with equal parts loss and alarm. How happy she’d been, that wild child. How innocent.
How careless. How defenseless.
Her coaxing having made no difference, Mother now turns stern. This nonsense has gone on long enough. She gets Rosalie’s bonnet from the wall peg, pulls it on over Rosalie’s braids. She ties it, perhaps too tightly. She stands at the door until Rosalie goes through it.
Rosalie looses the dogs. It excites them almost past their endurance to be freed. There are two of them now, Veto and Rolla, the gentler offspring of the original savages, a trio who used to slip the property in order to rip out the throats of the neighbors’ pigs, so that Father was forced to buy the bodies and, much to his horror, let them be eaten.
Veto and Rolla race first to the cabin, where Asia has continued to carry on and they are anxious to discover who would torment a child so. After that, they scatter and Rosalie has to call them back. They return, leap about her, the barking and Asia’s crying both rising in pitch and volume and still Rosalie can hear her own heartbeat, banging away in her ears. She dislikes loud noises. They make her head ache.
She unties her bonnet, but it doesn’t help. The gate is a quarter mile away. Mother is in the doorway, watching. “The mail won’t walk itself here,” she says, unkindly since it could easily walk here with June. When Rosalie returns, if Rosalie returns, Mother may wish she hadn’t been in such a hurry for Father’s letter. One never knows about Father’s letters.
Rosalie takes a heavy step, and then another, and then another. The dogs pad along beside her, quietly now, but Rosalie can hear them panting, and she forces herself to concentrate on all the things she can hear, tease them apart: the four-note stream where they swim, a six-note mockingbird in the woods, a far-off woodpecker drumming for insects, the wind shuffling new leaves. Her staccato heart, beating, beating, beating.
She makes it past the beeches and out into the open. She tilts her head back, and the great blue wheels above her, a dizziness so empty she feels it sucking her straight up into the sky. There is so much noise. The world is shrieking and spinning around her.
She runs for the woods. Soon, but it doesn’t feel soon, she’s skirting the meadow of the family graveyard. The pink hibiscus is already budding on the iron railing. Mother used to tell her that those flowers were gowns the fairies wore when they went to fairy balls; the bare rings in the forest where grass never grows, their ballrooms. Rosalie wanted to pluck the blooms, waltz them in pairs in her hands, but Father said no. No trees felled nor flowers picked on the farm. In his presence, at least, the older children follow these rules scrupulously. The younger will turn out less compliant.
Mother believes that her dead children are all eating from golden plates and flying about on silken wings, but Rosalie knows otherwise. She feels the breeze-like fingers of the three children buried nearby. They touch her face, her neck, whisper excitedly about this living thing on the path. They weave about her, web her in, whispering about the things that she evokes in their memories: churned butter honey biscuits warm milk bonnet ties when the wind blows little redcap little redbreast perhaps when you’ve taken a nap your little white cheek will be red didn’t you ever dream of a house up on a treetop the sea you can never be sure of it.
Stars, hide your fires, they tell her. Don’t leave us here.
How shocked everyone would be to learn that the child who consorts with ghosts is Rosalie. She does this so that Mother won’t have to.
Now comes a part of the path so dangerous that the ghosts don’t follow. Rosalie has seen strange men here before, here where the path and the forest meet. She’s seen dark figures draw back into the shadows as she passes, hide behind the largest tree, a massive trunk all sheathed in lichen. Maybe it was only one man and one time. She knows that people come to the forest to hunt. Sometimes the baying of hounds can be heard, or the crack of a rifle, sometimes a tree is hit and bleeds its golden sap, but no hunter would have felt the need to duck away at the sight of her. She gestures for Rolla to stay close, but Rolla ignores this and Rosalie can’t risk raising her voice, calling attention to herself.
A few months back, Grandfather had taken her aside for a warning. Now that she’s growing up, he’d said, she should know some things. Some hard truths. The forest is a place where girls disappear, and not just the pretty ones. Then things are done to them, the things all the more terrifying for being so vague. He mentions Alex Verdan, who farms nearby, and whom every child in Harford County, boy and girl, black and white, has been warned to stay away from. Not that she’d meet Mr. Verdan in the forest, but someone like Mr. Verdan. Why, Rosalie wonders, was she ever allowed to play there?
She’s almost certain now that she’s being watched. The very fact that she’s running confirms it. She hears footsteps behind her, each one timed exactly to match her own, and if no one is there when she looks back that just suggests a preternatural cunning.
She reaches the gate, breathless and with her hair coming out of her braids and into her face. She’s teary and phlegmy, because she still has to return and it seems unfair. Having made it here really should have been enough for Mother. She sits down on the walk beside the bag of mail, her back against the gate, the dogs crowding in close, flanking her protectively. The damp of the ground seeps through her skirt and two petticoats. She wipes her face with a petticoat hem.
All three of them are panting. Rosalie takes hold of Veto’s ruff, pulls him in, his black fur and wet breath hot in her face. She puts her head on the hard ridge of his head. He holds very still until she’s breathing more steadily and can let him go.
To delay her return, she makes a fan of the mail in her lap. Five letters for her father, two of them from England in the same female hand. A magazine with articles about farming. Two playbills for shows in Philadelphia and Boston. Three newspapers. Two letters for her mother, both from Charleston, but only one of them from Father. The packet is too thin to contain money. Mother will be sorry about that; there are always bills to pay. Rosalie holds the letter to her forehead to see if she can tell by touch alone what it might do to Mother. She cannot.