Last fall, before the children were born, Vern had harvested sinew from the deer carcasses the fiend had left scattered, drying the muscle fibers in sacks. In June, she’d weaved them into strings for a bow she’d made out of a young oak.
She figured her bow had only a forty-pound draw weight, but it was enough. She took down a boar after a day of tracking. Dried or smoked, it would feed her family for who knew how long.
She fished, too, made a net with dried fiber from inner basswood bark, ready for weaving after two weeks of drying. She dug up worms and affixed them to her net. Barefoot, she swirled her contraption in the river. Though her nightgown was no shield against the icy water, she did not shiver. Obstinately still, Vern had made a pact a long time ago to do the opposite of whatever was expected of her as often as possible. She and Lucy were kin in that regard. They’d done the calculations as small children. Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.
“Feh,” said Howling, pointing downward to the water from his spot on her waist. He was saying fish, and it was his first word. “Feh!”
“Don’t be thinking it’s all for you.”
Vern cooked her daily catches over a fire, and, as with all her food, preserved the excess, smoking what remained over hardwood burned down to coal.
Foraging, fishing, hunting, trapping—if she kept at it every day and ignored her body’s bids for rest, her little family might survive another winter, fiend be damned.
She hadn’t stopped thinking about Reverend Sherman’s hound all winter, spring, and summer. His pale, blank face dwelled uninvited in her brain like a haint. She needed to know who he was to her husband and what he had to do with her former home.
As far as Vern knew, the only white people Reverend Sherman ever spoke to were journalists, IRS types, and social workers, who, despite surely uncovering illegal activities on the compound, never removed any of the children.
Sherman preached that Cainland’s untouchability by the law was because of the God of Cain, but Vern was old enough now to know there was no God of Cain. Something else safeguarded the compound. Or someone else. The fiend was as likely a candidate as anyone. Maybe he was a sheriff who’d made a dirty deal with Sherman.
Or a judge? Like the one who gave Lucy back to her father at Cainland after her escape. Her daddy didn’t just get full custody. Her mam lost the right to any contact. The way Lucy told it once she’d been forced to return, a judge who could rule in her father’s favor had to be in Cainland’s pocket.
Vern recalled her last night with Lucy, the few hours they’d spent together before Lucy got away again, this time for good. There was a welcome-back supper for her at Reverend Sherman’s house—the year before his house was also Vern’s house. It was to be a celebration of the God of Cain’s will being done. He’d saved Lucy from the clutches of her mam’s heathen hands and the toxicity of the outside world.
Vern had been jumping rope on the porch when Lucy and her dad arrived. Her dress was tied up almost to her knees to allow her more freedom, her handmade leather moccasins discarded somewhere out in the front yard. She was working up a sweat and smelled like what her mam called “outdoors.”
“My turn!” said Lucy, running up the porch steps.
“No, ma’am,” said Lucy’s father sternly, pointing inside.
Reverend Sherman came outside to intervene. “Douglass, let them have their little fun. They aint seen each other in almost half a year. The God of Cain loves Black joy. Come inside while they play.”
Reverend Sherman could be like that sometimes. A savior. He gestured for Douglass to come into the house, and Douglass had no choice but to obey.
“Keep it quiet. Grown folks is inside talking,” Douglass told Lucy, then let the screen door shut behind him.
As soon as they were alone together on the porch, Lucy told Vern about the judge, her mouth motoring on at a rate Vern struggled to keep up with. “My mama raised money, you know, loads of it. Thousands and thousands of dollars for the best lawyers in the country, but somehow, by some antimiracle, my daddy still got custody of me. We had all the evidence. Mama had been spending months gathering up stuff in secret before she left Cainland. I’m talking photos, recordings, everything. Stuff my daddy done to me. Stuff that happens on the compound. We even had proof of the Ascensions and sleeping strapped down! I went on the stand and said everything that happened here, but it didn’t make a lick of difference. Judge said my mam arranged for my kidnapping and because she’d broken the law, lost her rights to me. Bullshit. You know Reverend or somebody had to have paid him off.”