“Da?” he repeated, and headed toward the noise, crawling with incredible speed. Vern picked up Feral and followed after her eldest until they located the source of the sound. Howling spotted it first. “Beh.” Bird.
Vern squatted down. There it was, a dead woodpecker, its little head sunken in on one side, balancing precariously on a twisted neck. Vern had done that, had thrown a rock and killed a bird with the force of it. It wasn’t the miracle crushing the stone would’ve been, but it was something. At Cainland, kids killed birds all the time, though usually with aid of a slingshot. Crows, mostly, who went for the crops. Never with just a throw.
Vern dug a hole in the mud for the bird and placed it inside. She tried to summon up some gentleness for the creature as she covered it in dirt, but the burial was rote, Vern’s mind on other matters. Howling reached his hands up. She lifted him so that he was on her shoulders, while Feral remained in place on her hip. Their combined weight, about forty or forty-five pounds, posed no strain. It hadn’t in months. The children felt no heavier than two wool-stuffed teddies.
As she walked back to camp, Vern bent down to gather fallen branches for firewood, tucking the long, unruly things under her arm as she did most days. Howling wiggled and pointed from his spot on her shoulders, but she did not struggle to balance him even with her other burdens. She hopped over a fallen tree, the diameter of its dead trunk at least a foot. Over the summer, Vern had grown into a miniature titan, and she was only now realizing it. It hit her with the same calamitous punch that puberty had. Suddenly, nine years old, she’d been unable to escape the animality of her body. Coarse hair and blood.
When she considered it, this change was not so sudden, though. Before the bird, before bruising her babes, before her feats last night putting out the bonfire, there was last winter, when she’d bolted from tree to tree to get away from the fiend.
And before that, of course, before that was her escape from Cainland.
* * *
THE NIGHT OF HER LEAVING, Vern’s mam, as usual, had been listening to gospel. Ruthanne had set her favorite song to loop till dawn. Steal away, steal away home. I aint got long to stay here.
The music pressed through the mesh of the screen door, making its way to where Vern sat on the porch railing. “Turn that off!” Vern yelled, but there was no point. Mam needed the music to sleep.
Vern stood. With feet clung to the white-painted wood of the porch, she pretended her blowing nightgown was a mast. In the ship of her body, she might sail anywhere.
“Vern, sweet girl, it’s time for bed,” Sherman called from inside. “You need all the sleep you can get. Little Thurgood needs his mam strong.”
“I’m sleeping on the porch tonight,” Vern said, though Sherman had already forbidden it.
“Brother Jerome’s gonna be by shortly to strap us down,” Sherman said. “Your mama and brother are already in bed.”
Fog rolled in over the compound like froth spewing from a devil dog’s mouth. Vern wanted to voyage its waves, or sink to her death in it.
At the Blessed Acres of Cain, where no one doubted the dictates espoused in her husband’s rousing sermons, Vern stood out as a vapor. It wasn’t the albinism that made other Cainites doubt her substance—though in a community built on devotion to Blackness, to African ancestry, it played its part. What rankled them most was her doubt. She did not believe as they believed. Such an uncertain girl, how could she not see herself in the fog’s shapelessness?
With Lucy gone, she was but a lone wisp.
This was the real reason Sherman had married her, she suspected: he’d sensed her misgivings about Cainland’s mission and wanted to contain them.
“I’m not going upstairs,” Vern said.
Her husband opened the screen door. The creaking of its hinges nearly concealed his sigh. “I don’t want to get into it tonight,” he said.
If she didn’t stop her protests soon, he’d send her to the old well. That was the step that preceded an Ascension. She’d be made to stand on the ledge until he’d deemed she’d learned her lesson. Twelve hours, usually. Back in the day, under Eamon Fields’s rule, it was longer. If a woman’s legs wobbled from weariness, she might very well fall twenty feet down to the water.
Falling showed how weak a woman’s spirit was, so she’d be left treading water to strengthen her resolve. And if she hit her head on the well wall tumbling down? Eamon Fields never had anything to say about that. Vern was twelve when she’d gone to the well with Lucy, the two of them calling down to the bottom to see if anyone would call back up. They used to swear they could hear screaming gurgling up from the depths.