“Howling!” she called, dropping her net and all the fish within it. She waded and waded as fast as she could till the water grew deep and she had to swim. Pondweed, slimy and numerous, glided against her calves. Something thick and tubular slunk between her thighs, either a water moccasin or a fish.
“Howling, where are you?” she called, overwhelmed by the coursing water. It splashed her face and flooded her eyes. It slid into her throat, then sprang back out as she coughed with the burn of it. “Why don’t you scream, child?” she called out through stifled breaths. “You know I need you to scream for me! Scream!”
Her gown clung to her skin, pressing her backward and down. She reached forward, praying her finger might grasp Howling’s ankle or wrist. Desperately, she pawed a soft mat of curls, thinking it her babe’s hair, but it was only star grass. A piece of driftwood lifted her hopes once more, but, softened by water, it dissolved in her hands.
“Howling!” she called again, and she ducked her head under to search. Her voice warbled in the water as she sobbed her child’s name. Vern could not make herself stop swimming, no matter how hopeless the cause. This was surely her own sin catching up with her—for hadn’t she thought the night he was born to leave him to the mercy of the river?
The cold numbed her, and a cramp knotted her abdomen. She was about to slip under the water into the dark when, finally, she saw him. He’d been caught by a large branch just ahead and to the side. “I’m coming, baby,” she called.
Vern swam to him, fighting the current to move toward the bank.
“Howling,” she said, coughing up water and rubbing her eyes. “Howling. Baby.”
It was not her kin. It was not her babe. This child was older, five or even six, dressed in brown linen rags. She’d seen him back upriver and assumed it was Howling. “Oh, little one,” she said, half with guilty relief that it wasn’t her babe who was dead. “Where is your mam?”
She wrestled the child’s body to the bank and laid it down over a patch of long brown grass. “Oh, sweet thing,” she said. Vern thought to give him mouth-to-mouth but the body was already stiff with death. He’d been dead long before she’d first seen him.
Vern shivered. She knew a lot about drowning. Had done it many times back at the compound. “If I’d known you were here, I’d have taught you to swim.” She looked around, hopeful a caretaker was close by, a mother, a grandmother, a father, an uncle, someone who might see to the child’s burial, someone who might kiss his forehead and dress him properly before laying them to rest.
“Somebody!” she called. “Have you lost your littlun?”
But the child had no one. He’d survived alone in the woods by his wits, much like Vern had done. “I will come back for you,” she promised, drawing her thumb across his cheek. “But I got to return to my own children.” She kissed him one more time.
By the time she hiked back to her children upriver, they were both napping, curled up into each other like was often the case—and alive. It was not usual for them to nap so late in the day anymore. Seeing her go, they must’ve cried and fussed until they were spent and collapsed.
She strapped her sleeping babies to her. Goodness, how indecent, to be brought to such stirs of emotion, to be so entrenched. Nothing in this great wide earth was built to last, and life was not a prettiful thing. Her Howling, her Feral, they’d die, and before that have troubles aplenty that would make them wish they would die. Knowing that, why was it not easier to rein her passion for their wellness into something less hot and unkempt?
Once at camp, she crawled into their shelter and put Howling and Feral upon the thicket of compressed leaves. It wasn’t a proper bed, was it? It wasn’t where babes should sleep, atop composting earth matter, the smell of wet and rot and smoke all around.
Walking out of the Blessed Acres of Cain had seemed a miracle, the compound of little wooden houses surrounding the prayer temple, sad squares in her wake, but maybe Sherman’s ravings about the outside world were correct. Everything beyond Cainland’s borders was the devil incarnate, and she’d dragged her babes right past the beast’s tender uvula into the throat. Vern wrapped herself around her babes, tucking their forms into the C-fold of her body. Their whistling breaths lulled her to sleep, a sleep that dragged on and on, until it was much past dark. She awoke to find both her babes feeding from her, recovered from any earlier distress. Coyotes yipped and howled in the night, merry witches tearing flesh asunder. Was it the dead child they feasted upon?