Page 18

June 28, 1997 · Gone Two Days

MORNING.Fog thinned itself into a skin of old milk. Luce lay on the couch, forearm covering her eyes, the other arm draped onto Moose’s body on the floor, rubbing his belly. Each time she stopped, he lifted his head to look at her, tongue hanging out the side, so she’d start again. Her eyes stung, dry and raw. Spinning through the memory of the cow-skull woman, doubting she’d actually heard the voice in Gem’s room say it, but she had, hadn’t she, she had, and then she’d remembered, or dreamed it, that whole impossible night, the memory creeping through her, and it was morning again. And in her head—thick cobwebs, glue slowing everything down.

The house hushed. There was the low grr of the old refrigerator, the pipes gurgling, the beams creaking beneath the weight of their living. The scratch of a squirrel’s claws on the roof. And then there was another sound, something farther away. A kind of clicking, like the sound of a sliding glass door locking shut.

It was not close by—how could she hear it? She stood up, pacing the room, called Moose over, and he came, good boy, his ears swiveling as he trotted. He heard it too.

Luce opened the front door. It was louder. Be rational. A bird, maybe, warning a predator. That was possible, probable, though the sound felt eerily human, and no longer unfamiliar. She’d heard it before. A human mouth’s click. She could feel her heart quickening. Bravery wasn’t complicated—it meant just doing the thing, she reminded herself, following the sound outside and toward the hills.

It was early enough that fog obscured everything beyond the first crowd of trees. Click. A cowboy’s click for the horse to giddyap. Moose trotted out ahead, his nose low to the ground as he swerved with each smell he caught. Luce followed the trail behind her house that led through the redwoods and eventually up into the wild, dead hills—no, dead-grass hills, she corrected herself. Each step gave a little. Layers of dead needles beneath, dirt, stones, worms, and deeper, through time’s flattening, carapaces, dried blood, crushed bones, everything that had lived and died right in this slice of earth. What should she make of all that history ever-present beneath and around her, she wondered, but the sound clicked again, louder than it was inside the house.

She left the redwoods, climbing out of the fog and into the brown grass. The sides of the trail were rimmed with hip-high thistles, dried cottony flowers on top and dark brown leaves sagging against the stalk all the way down, yielding to collapse. Tall dead things, Luce thought. Oh, dramatic. Good lord. Don’t try to make this mean anything.

All at once, Moose was sprinting full speed off into the woods. A deer probably, which he would never catch. She watched him dart below bushes, leap over a fallen log, and disappear into the brush. And then the click came, loud. It was close. Something cold inside her sweatshirt, taking small, freezing nips at her backbone, so cold it almost felt as if it would transform her into something else, maybe one of the thistles she saw all around, and she was suddenly afraid all the way down her legs, thinking these stalks were other walkers, trapped.

Click.

Nonsense. She forced a step up the path. This was not her mother, clicking with Gem, faces pressed close. Click. Nobody around.

Luce was a quarter mile from home, marching up the hillside’s spine. Not too much farther to the smash shack, and who would be there, wailing on the rocks. She remembered a story one of the women in the Red Grove had told when Luce was young: two illicit lovers trying to make love up in the hills had gone a little too far past the boundary, and the spurned husband, who’d learned of their plans ahead of time, was hiding behind a rock with a gun, and—we all know that story. And she thought about the man who called, standing out on their deck, maybe he was in the shadows somewhere, maybe he’d come for her—

She didn’t yet see the low stone wall or the tree trunks ringed in red that indicated the boundary, though it was true that the wall wasn’t completed all the way, had gaps, or even places where there’d once been wall but it had since fallen to rubble, or birds had pecked off the tree’s thread—you could see them sometimes, a jay or a hawk flying past, a long red thread, like intestines, trailing from its mouth. From this trail the wall was particularly hard to spot. Sometimes the boundary between safe and unsafe was invisible.

The clicks had stopped. She came upon one of those rare patches of bright yellow daffodils, so startlingly vibrant against the drought of early summer. How did they survive? The click had stopped her here. She stepped off the path, scrambling up the steep hillside until she was beside them. If she turned around, she could see past the tops of trees and across the whole valley to the mounded hills on the other side, bare, too. But she did not turn around again. Her eyes were on the daffodils, yellow skulls. She took a few steps farther into their patch, crushing one beneath her foot, and then a few steps farther still. There was something in the ground, between the flowers. Dug-up grass, clods turned over and packed back down.

As if an animal—a mountain lion—had been digging for something right here. She backed away from the yellow skull flowers, wishing each step was a year back in time so that in ten steps she could be scooped up in Gem’s arms, and then, beneath her foot, something hard.

It was not a rock. There was a glint of light against metal. It was packed into the hardened ground like it’d been there a long time. Her fingernails filled with dirt as she scratched it out. Old silver, tarnished, rusted. She picked it up. In her hand was a locket the size of a cherry, flat, dirty. She tried to pry the locket open, but it wouldn’t budge. Rusted shut. Caked. What was so familiar about this?

She turned the locket over in her hand—yes. She knew this locket. When they first moved into the Red Grove, to this house at the top of the hill, she’d found it, coiled and rusty, on her bedroom floor. It was the necklace she’d slipped into Gem’s hand in those early months, when she was still sure she’d die. When she wanted to infuse an object with her Gem so that she might always have her.

She hadn’t even remembered losing it, but here it was, up on the ridge, beneath the dirt. She slipped it into her pocket, but then there it was again—click. She didn’t wait to find out what came next.

She ran, nearly tumbling down the slope, back to the path. A cold whip against her neck, foolish, she knew, foolish to be afraid of what was surely the sound of squirrels cracking nuts between their teeth, the fog condensing into droplets and finding a puddle below. She ran faster. How could a sound follow her?

It was right beside her.

It was almost inside her ear.

She ran faster, but now she could hear another sound. Somewhere behind her, leaves were crunching. She knew, she knew, as if her mother’s ice fingers had tiptoed all the way up to her throat, that she was being chased.

Click.

Luce ran, jumping over sticks, between rocks that would snap an ankle. Back down the dirt path, gone the winking daffodils, the tucked-in bones, gone the loose, hot rocks. A branch behind her snapped. She ran, not tripping, don’t trip, running over rocks, around bends, the sharp, tall dead grasses scraping at her calves. Run. Don’t look, can’t, just run and run. And then all at once, almost laughing out loud, she thought, Moose. Of course.

She slowed her sprint to a jog, sighed out the breath she’d been gulping, her whole body loosening its muscled grip. Of course. Dog. She was about to turn around to greet him when something caught her eye up ahead. A rustle of leaves, a flash. She was at a slow jog, peering up ahead. Out of the bush, sprinting toward her, was Moose.

He was up ahead. And so what was the sound behind?

She could not look.

Back to a full sprint then, and she was nearly to the house, Moose barreling closer. Her chest was burning, lungs ready to explode. And then she was at the house, up the steps two at a time, Moose right at her heels, across the deck to the door, did not look back. She stood on the inside of the door. Waited for the click. She listened so hard, she heard tingles inside her ears, her breath still shooting out hot from her lungs. There would be a knock. A big, heavy pound on the door. There would be claws against the grain. Something wanting in. She would hear it, and the ice would be back, and she knew, she knew, that at that moment this foundational belief she’d held on to, that she was safe from what she wanted to be safe from, would be gone.

She waited. She listened. She heard only Moose’s ragged breath, and her own.

And then she had a terrible thought. Why was she only listening for the sound outside the door? She turned slowly and faced the rest of the house. What was different?

Nothing.

Nothing, because nothing had been out there, nothing chasing her, nothing clicking. It was not a sound from her mother’s mouth, speaking a language she didn’t know. It was not her mother, clicking her onward toward—what?—what.

The kitchen floors were cold beneath her, creaking. Moose lapped at his water bowl.

“Roo,” she called, but he didn’t answer. She walked into the living room, not there, bathroom, nope, and then Gem’s room. Gem was in bed, eyes open. But no Roo. His room was empty. What if whatever had made those clicks had come for him?

She walked into the hallway that led to the office. The door was cracked. Framed by the wall and the wood was a slice of the office, Roo standing inside. Luce could see that the windows were open, dust motes shimmering gold in the sun breaking through fog, and Roo seemed to glow a little, too. A breeze blew through the room, billowed the thin fuchsia sari with golden flowers tied above the windows out into the room unevenly, beside where Roo stood, so that there appeared to be a boy inside them, another boy, a little phantom body pressing against the cloth from the wall, though once the gust quelled, the boy who wasn’t there was gone.

All the light in the room seemed to point to Roo. He stood perfectly still. There was something about his posture. His spine was straight and his legs, ivory toothpicks, freckled in great orange blotches, were locked, but the objects in the room seemed to be quivering, and Luce had the sense that they were readying to raise themselves into the air, join a galaxy of swirling objects.

He jerked. The objects stilled.

Luce could see that his arm was bent and, as he nodded his head to the side, he held something in his hand. It was the office phone. The one that sat with no cords, plugged into nothing.

Luce held very still. Goose bumps on the back of her neck.

“I can’t hear you very well,” Roo said, his voice cracking halfway through. His back was to Luce. “Can you say that again?” With his hand still holding the phone up to his ear, Roo heard a floorboard groan beneath Luce’s foot and half turned his face to where she was. Were his eyes different? Was there some sort of milky skin across them, dulling the blue? He turned away from her again. She could see the pointy tips of his shoulder bones beneath his T-shirt, wings that never grew.

“Give me the phone,” Luce whispered to Roo’s back. He cocked his head away from her, pressing his ear harder into the receiver. He started to say something, but stopped. Nodded instead.

“Roo,” Luce hissed, more aggressive than she’d meant, but he didn’t move. She lurched forward then, grabbing the phone out of his hand and spinning in one motion, pressing the phone to her ear. She was the one with the special relationship to the Red Grove, he was a little kid, she should be the one to hear whatever was coming through. Shoulders crunched against her neck, she could not even imagine what she was about to hear. “Hello?” she said into the line. Tried to listen past the whooping throb of blood in her ears. The phone was heavy. A weight she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe there was something else inside it. She waited for it to make a sound.

But the only sounds she could hear were crickets out the open window. A rumble in her stomach. She counted to ten. Squeezed her eyes shut so she could concentrate solely on her ears. When she turned back to Roo, he was blinking up at her with a small, hopeful smile, eyebrows raised.

“You shit,” Luce said.

He squinted then, his smile gone. “What?”

“Roo. You’re an asshole.”

His freckles blended into an orange mass beneath his reddening cheeks. “Didn’t you hear her?”

“Shut up.”

“You didn’t?” he said, his forehead creased and older than he was, concerned.

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you?”

“There was nobody on the line, Roo. The phone isn’t even plugged in. It’s a dead phone.”

“It’s not just a dead phone,” he said. He started hopping from foot to foot, his excitement growing. “That’s what I thought too, at first. But it’s even more special than that. It can also talk to non-dead people.”

“Stop it!” Luce yelled. The sound startled them both.

“I was talking to someone,” Roo said. He’d stopped hopping, brought his voice lower and quieter. “I couldn’t figure out who it was for a long time. The voice was hard to hear, and it kept breaking up, like that one time we got a call from the person in France. There was lots of static. But then I could hear. It was a faraway voice.”

“Whose voice?”

“Hers.”

“Fuck, who, Roo?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure. It was hard to tell. But I think maybe—” He stopped, held still. All at once, Roo sprinted across the office and turned into the hallway. Luce followed, also moving fast, and watched him round the corner into Gem’s room.

Because, what if it was Gem?

She would have woken up and called the phone. She would be smiling, yawning. She would blink, and when her eyelids opened again, she would reach a hand out to Luce, brushing her cheek. She’d say, You found me.

Roo stood beside Gem’s bed. She did not have her eyes open. She was not blinking, did not extend an arm off the bed, and as Luce stepped closer, she saw that Gem’s hands were more clawed than ever. The fingers were stiff and bent in on themselves. Her skin— pale with a chalky hue from so many years in bed, unmoving, out of the sun—was a different color. There were patches of purple with greens melting in, a gray around her face, a layer of storm clouds growing across her skin, and what did it mean? Gem’s hand was cold. Luce squeezed it, her fingers leaving a white thumbprint that slowly filled itself back in with gray. Luce’s heart kicked up again.

“What is buried must be uncovered,” Roo said. “That’s what the voice told me.”

“What does that mean?” Luce asked, pressing her ear close to Gem’s nose. Her breath was loud, ragged.

“I don’t know.”

“Roo,” Luce said, keeping her eyes on Gem’s chest to watch how slowly it expanded. It was her job to find stillness and calm she didn’t have and offer it to him. “I know you miss Mom. And I know this is really scary. She’ll come back.”

“I think it’s a puzzle,” he said, close to Gem’s face on the other side, but not touching her. “What is buried must be uncovered. Like a secret—that’s the kind of thing that gets buried, right?” He was pulling one of his earlobes, something he’d done as a littler boy. Luce studied him carefully—he was inventing a voice, must be, and where had he even heard that line, so formal sounding? But, okay, taking it seriously for a minute, because enough strange things had been happening—what had been buried was the locket. It felt cold inside her pocket. She’d uncovered it. Same with that carved bone she’d found a few days back, before the altered axis of their lives. What answers were they supposed to provide? Perhaps if she could pry the locket open—she pulled it out, jimmied her thumbnail in, but it would not budge. She couldn’t remember it ever having opened.

Light that had traveled through the maze of trees outside came into the room, not bright, but hazy and summer yellow, one beam landing on Roo’s small, thumping heart. “I’ll call back,” Roo said, turning toward the office again.

“No,” Luce said, squeezing his shoulder. She tapped his chin so he was looking right up at her. “Do not play with that again.”

“I wasn’t playing,” he said, pushing her hand off. “You’re jealous ’cause you don’t know how to use it. Mom did. I do. Gem would. But not you. I should get to be the one in the office. Mom doesn’t want you.” Before she had time to respond, he ran down the hallway to his bedroom and slammed the door.

She didn’t go after him. He was right.

She remembered back to a day when they’d been in the hospital visiting Gem, waiting to see if she’d live or die. Luce, eight, in a foldout chair against the wall, bouncing baby Roo on her lap and staring at Gem. Willing her to wake up, promising whoever or whatever was listening in her mind that she’d spend the rest of her life, all of it, being good; they’d studied Gandhi in school, so that’s what she promised. I’ll be Gandhi forever, I’ll be helpful and nice, if only you will wake Gem up.

But she didn’t wake up. And then she still didn’t wake up. Luce sat in her foldout chair, arms wrapped around the baby when he needed it but mostly around herself. What she needed was someone else’s arms around her, and thinking this, she looked in front of her, at her mother’s back, stooped beside Gem. Her mother was awake. Maybe if she got her mother to love her, it would travel through and wake up Gem. So she came up with a plan.

She said she had to pee, but instead of turning into the hallway bathroom, she kept walking into the elevator and through the lobby and right out the hospital’s sliding glass doors and through the parking lot and along a small paved path that plopped her into the forest. Up above, the needles let little squints of light come through. The world suddenly smelled like dirt and water and wonderful, and even a faint stink from something rotting smelled wonderful too. She stayed there a long time, thinking, deliciously, about how worried her mother would be about where she’d gone. How big a hug she’d get. How much love it would shoot into her, jolting Gem right awake. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she returned.

She turned the corner into the room, holding back her smile. Gloria was rocking Roo with one arm, kissing his small hot head. The other arm was stretched out across the hospital bed, holding Gem’s hand.

Where have you been? her mother asked, but didn’t reach out for her. Didn’t pull her in close. Gem was still gone, and her mother’s arms already held the things she found most precious. There was no space for anyone else.

It was a week before Tamsen was out of bed, but the stranger, Ines, had tended to the bite each day and, with instruction, fished the stream, taken care of the garden, gathered plants, pulled water from the creek. Within a week, the infection had subsided and Tamsen had regained much of her strength. The wound was still mending, though, and sometimes, in her dreams, the strangest thing would happen—she would hear a kind of mountain lion’s scream coming from the sever in her skin.

One day, a few weeks after Ines arrived, Tamsen was down at the base of the valley, checking traps, when a passing traveler rode by. He was small, and he stopped just past where Tamsen worked to water his horse in the creek. The traveler told Tamsen that railroad construction was booming north and south of this little valley, but the railroad men had found this terrain impossible to build upon and so were taking another path clear around these hills to connect the big city on the bay south of the valley to the mountains full of gold farther north.

“Why, then, are there more horses traveling these treacherous paths?” Tamsen asked, nodding to his horse, who had waded into the creek.Tamsen had no claim to the land, didn’t actually know who owned it, but she appreciated that few people came through because of the difficulty of passage.

He shifted, leaned in closer to her, and spoke quietly. “You ever heard of Hank Monk?” Tamsen nodded. She didn’t get much news up around here, but she’d heard another traveler mention Hank Monk. He was a stagecoach driver, best one in California, and the fiercest, too. Story went, a rattlesnake startled the horse he was watering, and the horse, standing beside Hank Monk, had kicked him right in the eye. It was gone, an empty flap of skin that he’d show little kids if they got in his way, though he mostly kept it covered with a black piece of cloth. Hank Monk knew all the mountain passes and game trails, and he drove his stagecoach fast and wild through whichever path would most quickly get him and his passengers to their destination, standing up with one hand on the reins and the other pointed backward to shoot away approaching danger. He was feared and respected. Bandits couldn’t catch him, ghosts couldn’t spook him.

“He’s starting running his stagecoach here,” the stranger said. He’d finished watering his horse and had mounted again, ready to take off. There had been more activity down in the base of the valley. Up the hill, Tamsen’s cabin wasn’t in the direct path of the increasing horse traffic, but she relied on fishing and hunting at the base of the valley, where the creeks were widest and the salmon spawned and she had the clearest open shot for deer. “I’d watch out if I were you,” the man said. “Only good thing about Hank Monk being close is that mostly the Indians steer clear. He has some kind of agreement with them—you haven’t seen any around these parts, have you?”

Tamsen shook her head. She didn’t know anything about them beyond the tales her husband and his brothers told before they’d headed west. “Well, that’s something to celebrate at least. But keep your watch. There are no good stories about what happens to a woman alone when Hank Monk comes along.” She tucked this information away, straightened her spine, and went to work on the squirrel she’d trapped.

Fawns grew into deer, grasses died and lay down on the dirt, protecting spring’s new shoots, and some time later, another woman appeared, a young widow who had lost her husband in a stagecoach accident. Whispers had spread in her town about where Ines had found shelter. This woman brought three small children along.

Tamsen refused. No space, she said, believing that more people here would attract more attention, make it more likely that her husband would find her. But she would not tell them the story of why she feared him and so told them no story at all, and the woman and her children stayed.

They built a shelter right alongside Tamsen’s house, using one of the exterior walls as a new interior wall for an adjoining cabin, rooms blossoming into rooms. The children learned quickly how to trap small animals and weed the garden, and Tamsen did not like to admit how she felt hearing their light, laughing voices outside, little bells chiming in the wind. Their mother, however, did not laugh. She was a serious woman, and Tamsen often caught her staring down the hillside into the valley below, tensed.

The next woman who showed up hadn’t lost a husband at all, because she’d obstinately refused to marry. Her mother had died in childbirth, and the idea of being split into two dead halves tormented her dreams. She showed up fleeing the marriage her family was arranging, could recite every line from the Bible and then tell you which ones she thought were worth paying attention to, and had the loudest laugh anyone had ever heard, a hee-haw donkey bray that sent all the other women and children laughing when she laughed, and so she did it often, and easily.

One night by the fire, once the children were asleep, the woman whose husband had been a stagecoach driver told them a story. On his last trip, they’d come under attack, and only one person, a teenage boy, had survived to tell the tale. The attacker, the boy told the police, had a black eye patch and black lips. Tamsen knew right away: Hank Monk. She tightened her shawl around her shoulders, asking the great red trees to keep them hidden.

And in this way the band of women grew. Women, sneaking away, inscandal or secrecy, alone or with children, leaving the world where their lives were directed by men and arriving at the red grove. They lived quietly up in the hills, adding on to the original shelter with new, small rooms, hunting, growing crops, fishing, tanning hides, sewing clothes, and gathering what they could. The winters were mild and the crops grew with diverted stream water and the creeks flowed with salmon. It was not hard to survive. That was the strangest thing. It felt as if something in this valley and upon these hillsides were blessing them with good fortune and abundance, which, for all those gathered, was foreign.

Late at night, Tamsen paced the cabin, as silent as a cat. What she wanted was sound sleep and to trust the shadows, to prowl the darkness and not think about her husband or the other husbands these women had fled, out there somewhere. Probably her own husband had not survived, had not made it back to where he’d left his brothers and their wives. Probably he would not be looking for her, this wife he’d left for dead. Certainly he wouldn’t, she had to tell herself, and then tell herself again, peering out into the darkness.

There were eight people living together among the red groves with Tamsen Nightingale, and then there were twelve, then seventeen. The redwood forest provided easy hiding from wandering travelers and protected the women from weather. The longer they lived among the giant red trees, the more they came to know of the trees’ particular uses, sometimes through the trials of the women there who knew plants and could discern a potential quality from smell or taste or growth pattern, and sometimes through the wisdom they gathered from those who’d had exchanges with the people who lived here before them. Fresh needles were steeped in warm water to treat earaches or to purify the blood of the sick. Gummy sap mixed with water would deliver a stimulating tonic for those with malaise.

Tamsen walked the slopes and valley, watching Ines teach a newcomer how to harvest the new pliable sprouts growing from the burls ofdead redwoods and weave them into baskets. Children nearby were collecting sloughed-off chunks of bark, thick and soft, and others were pulling strips of new bark from some of the trees—never too much from a single tree or it could open it to infection. They marveled at the red spires, how fire had entered the grove once and cleared out the dead and dry underbrush, but the giant trees had remained intact, had, in fact, shot up a new crop of young trees just afterward, as if the fire itself had enabled new life. And they marveled that insects didn’t eat away the bark, sickening the tree, or that no mold or mildew seemed to take hold despite the dampness, all of it a miracle of fortitude and longevity that they would both use and emulate.

Back at the cabin, other women stuffed the bark on the inside of the walls for insulation against the chill of fog and occasional winter frost, one holding a piece while another secured it, swatting at one another playfully, sweating on the warm days, singing when the mood struck, engaged with a kind of purpose, not just because of the work, for they had all been working their whole lives in some form or another, but because it was suddenly true that the work of their hands was their shelter, their food, their lives. And other women were out gathering plants for food and medicine, or mending torn clothes, baking bread, whittling wood into utensils, tools—women working in pairs or small groups as gossip or instruction or the stories of their lives drew them closer. And in making their lives together, a greater sense of safety germinated, not only from the product of their industry but because of the women they were growing to trust.

One day, Tamsen looked down at her hands and noticed new spots, scars, knobs. It had been only a handful of years since she’d arrived—five, or was it seven—and she was not yet an old woman, but she had been working hard, and she realized, with surprise, that this was where she would live out her life. Here, in this red grove, with these women whose clenched jaws loosened the longer they lived out here, who startled less easily, who spread their knees wider when they sat and let out the waists of their dresses.

Ines liked to work outside, in the soil, expanding the area Tamsen had created for plants. The same plant could be both cure or poison, aphrodisiac or repellent. It depended upon the dose, upon the recipient, upon what was done to the plant before it entered the body of the receiver. As she worked, her silver locket glinted in the sun. Tamsen had never asked to see what was inside, and Ines had never offered.

Tamsen took long walks, sometimes for days at a time, deeper into the woods and beyond that to the rolling hills and, occasionally, even farther out toward the steep coast where the ocean broke against rocks in bright white explosions. Out there, on one of the thin stretches of land alongside the water, an amalgamation of birds gathered, birds that Tamsen had never seen before, big seabirds and tiny, delicate things and birds with iridescent stripes beneath their wings and a bird with feathers so blue it made the ocean look dull. She spooked them off their resting place and gathered the feathers they’d left behind, tucking them into her satchel alongside the herbs she pulled on these walks, learning year by year what was what, planting shoots into the garden they’d expanded and had come to reply upon.

Ines and Tamsen spent hours together in the garden, comparing what they knew about the properties of various plants and animal parts, cultivating nettles and nasturtium, violet and verbena, opening the gall bladders of snared hares and possums for their healing liquids, gathering the oil from glands in a skunk’s back for liniment. But as much as they learned together, there were still times when what troubled Tamsen was beyond what Ines knew to help her heal.

Tamsen was not always inside the cabin once night came. If everyone fell silent at once, though, they could hear her somewhere outside, a distant yowl. “They’re called mountain screamers where I’m from,” one of the women said. “I always heard cougar,” another said. “Or puma. Catamount.” “Why so many names for the same creature?” Ines asked, and another of the women said that there were some animals you couldn’t know well enough to name. On one of these nights—when the women, who both loved and feared Tamsen’s wildness, whispered to one anotherthat she might be out hunting with the lions, and then, in even lower, quieter whispers, that perhaps shewaspart lion—Ines told the gathered women a story.

Back in her mother’s village, Ines began, “There was once a time when the men all beat their wives and the sons beat their sisters, and so mothers wished to have no sons. This was an area known for the biggest mountain lions in the world, giants who stalked the hillsides at night and could take down any man trying to hunt them, which they did, and beat them, since the men thought they could conquer all. In this town lived a family with three sons. One morning, the family woke and realized the oldest son had gone missing. Villagers searched and searched, but could not find the boy. They decided to hike the hill, between the thick trees, to the house where the witch lived, to see if she knew anything about the boy. She did not, she said, but the villagers didn’t believe her, and they tortured her by piercing her ears with hot metal. The following morning, the second son was missing. The villagers searched, but could not find the boy, and once again returned to the witch. Like the last time, she said she knew nothing about the boy, but the villagers didn’t believe her, seeking more information by slicing off one baby toe and then the next, one pinky finger and then the other. That night, not willing to risk his youngest son, the father and the villagers set a trap to catch the witch. They built a door that would slam shut and lock once anyone entered the child’s room. In the darkest hours of the night they heard the trap slam shut, and they rushed into the room. The youngest son was gone. But in the room was the largest mountain lion anyone in the village had ever seen. She had pierced holes in her ears and only four toes on each of her massive paws. Filled with terror, the villagers parted, and the mountain lion walked out, licking her maw. From that day forward, men were too scared to want sons lest the witch eat them, and so they began to wish for daughters, and the daughters listened and arrived joyfully, filling the village with peace.”

“Are you saying that Tamsen Nightingale is one of those witches?” asked one of the children.

“It’s only a story,” Ines said, braiding the hair of one of the other women, who was half-draped across her lap. But the children and women paid extra attention to mountain lion tracks, to Tamsen’s absences and sorrows, feeling for her both reverence and terror, whispering to one another that they were quite sure they saw, inside her mouth, the point of one very long, very sharp tooth.