Vern liked not knowing, liked the possibility of it. Let him unfold as he would. In the woods, where animals ruled with teeth and claws, such things mattered not a lick. There were no laws here in this wild land, and wasn’t it better that way? At the compound, Vern saw how girlfolk and boyfolk were, what patterns they lived out as if notes on a record, their tune set in vinyl, rarely with variation. Even Vern’s best friend, Lucy, recalcitrant to the marrow, would call her a man when Vern, against compound edict, wore pants to muck out the animal pens or took a straight razor to her thick, coarse sideburns, longer than many men’s.
Did it have to be such? Was it always so? Or was it much like everything back at the Blessed Acres of Cain? A lie.
Vern’s babe was just a babe. Guided by scent, he found his way to her breast the way many a child would, his head bobbing as he squirmed toward her nipple. “You’d think I hadn’t been feeding you from my very own insides these last eight and a half months,” said Vern, teasing, but she didn’t resent him his hunger. No child of hers could ever be a sated thing.
It was evening, but only just. Mam said that children born of the gloaming were destined to wander; that was why Vern’s mind had always been so unquiet. You got more opinions than sense, Mam had said.
Vern had doomed her newborn to the same fate, but she would not apologize for it. Better not to belong at all than belong in a cage. She thought to name the child Hunter for all the searching in his squeezing fingers and hunger in his heart, but then what if her mam really was wrong and he was a girl in the end? A girl named Hunter. It gave her a pleasant zing to think of the impropriety of it.
Back at the compound, she’d be made to name him after a famous descendant of Cain. Malcolm or Martin or Frederick, perhaps Douglass or Eldridge. Vern’s little brother was Carmichael for Stokely, and among her peers, there was Turner for Nat, Rosa for Parks, Harriet for Tubman.
Vern herself was named for Vernon Johns, the scholar and minister who’d preceded Martin Luther King, Jr., at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
Lucy had complimented Vern on the name when she’d first come to the compound with her parents. It’s unique. No one’s heard of that Vernon man. I’m getting tired of hearing all these African American Greatest Hits names. This way you can be your own person.
If Sherman had his way, he’d name the child Thurgood, but Vern could not do that to her kin.
“Abolition?” she said, testing how it felt on her tongue. “Lucy?” she whispered, surprised by how much it hurt to speak that name aloud. “Lucy.” It’d anger Sherman to no end if she named his sole heir after the girl who never yielded to him once, and Vern lived to anger Sherman.
Vern licked her lips hungrily, overcome with a wave of inspiration. When the child was old enough to ask after a father, Vern would say it was Lucy. Raised in the woods, her little one wouldn’t know all the ways that wasn’t true. It was something she’d never hear the end of if Sherman were here, but then he wasn’t, was he? “Lucy,” she said one more time, then, “Lu. Luce. Louie?” searching out a variation that suited the fussy babe sprawled against her. “Lucius?”
None of the options felt suitable, and she frowned. Wild things didn’t bother naming their offspring, and Vern was wild through and through. Her mam had always said so. A child in the woods didn’t need a name, did it?
“I’ll just call you my little babe,” Vern said, planning to leave it at that, until she heard wolves in the distance making their wild noises to the night. There it was, a sensation of rightness. She didn’t have many of those, so when they came, they were easy to recognize. “Howling,” she said. “Howling. That’s your name.” He was her hungry, keening creature.
Just like her. Ravenous. For what? For goddamn what? There was nothing in these woods but darkness and a fiend who killed not for food or hide but for the pleasure it arose in him to end the life of something small. She’d fled the compound in want of something, and though she’d been gone for only a short while, she already knew she’d never find it.
* * *
THERE WERE NO WOLVES in these woods, not that Vern had ever heard of. Yet as her babe slept fretfully on her chest, lips still a-wobble over her areola, she heard their howling again, closer now than they’d been before.
Everybody at the Blessed Acres of Cain undertook thorough study of flora and fauna. There was none among them who couldn’t name near every animal and plant and fungus, what to do with it, how to tame it, how to kill it, how to make from it all the stuff needed for life. Reverend Sherman insisted upon this knowledge.