He came back in, wiping his hands on his shirt.
–All right.
He lifted her and I held her head so her neck didn’t pull, slipping my fingers under her curls. Soft warm scalp.
She looked much smaller, lain out in the hole Father had made for her. This was often the case.
The juice of her innards still clung to Father’s forearms with a slow, thick shine.
The mouth of the shovel caught the last of the evening light as he filled in the hole. Quick, practiced motion. The handle worn smooth where he gripped it. A high wind was rolling in, shaking the oleander and making the lamp over the patio door squeak. It was night, all of a sudden, and I was tired.
Miss Lennox’s dress had turned the colour of the damp ground. Now, almost covered up, she started to kick a little, her bare heels scuffing at the walls of her shallow bedding.
All this time I could hear her lungs: rocking inside the pantry, a sound like a boat tied at harbour. When the hole was filled Father walked across it in careful, even steps, pressing the soil down smooth.
He was very particular, when it came to digging.
Father started giving me slow drips of warning about The Ground when I was only a few weeks old.
–If it takes you there’s not much you can do. Try not to squirm and keep one hand straight up in the air. If you go in over your head, try not to open your mouth and eyes. No matter how long you’re there for, keep your face shut up tight.
–But you’ll see me?
–I’ll see you.
–And you’ll get me right away?
–There’s no reason for you to be in that part of the garden without me, anyway. Especially not before, during or after rain.
–But we’re from The Ground.
–We are, and it would take us back if it could.
It never took me, though I was out there for almost half of every day. Trying to keep myself company.
I’d no one like myself other than Father, who was always working, and I frightened the Cure children. First time I tried to lie down with a boy I didn’t know what I was doing. I lay down and he lay down over me and I held on tight. He went to put it in and there was nowhere for it to go and he got scared and bit me. Right on the neck. Left me with a toothy rosy ring and my smock creased ’round my thighs. Ran back to the house and to his mother who Father was busy curing. I looked up through the branches and tutted, wondering at the sweet-hurt ache I know now to be what Cures call ‘lust’, ‘longing’.
By the time I took Samson inside I’d grown myself an opening that I’d a dozen names for. The longing had come on strong enough by then, and so it appeared:
my glove
my pucker
my pouch
The first time was a week after I’d cured him. I’d been thinking about the soft fuzz of his hair on the back of his head and the strong tendons run up his throat.
I was walking toward Sister Eel’s Lake and the day was scalding. The long grass at the side of the dirt road yellow and chafing and all the trees wilting.
–Miss Ada? That you?
He’d parked his truck off the road, deep in shade. I could see him leaning on the door, an arm resting on the mirror at the driver’s side. I said
–What are you doing out here?
Knowing there was nothing between the Cures’ village and our home. He had on a white vest that his sweat saw stuck to him. I looked at his chest and its nest of hair. He was leaning on the side of the truck and now he laughed and rubbed at his hard, taut stomach.
–I thought you might sing to me.
We lay down in the open back of the truck and he asked if there was much chance of hurting me. I only laughed and when I took him inside I laughed again, it was that good a feeling.
And so, quickly, we got into the habit of one another.
Henry Law
It was easy to forget they’re not like us.
You could be looking at Miss Ada and talking to her simply, and then she’d say something like
Take into the account the evenings are getting long, Mr Law.
Her father too. We’d be talking easily enough and then all of a sudden I’ll remember he knew my pop and all my uncles from the day they were born ’til the day they died.
I suppose it was easy to forget because they made it easy. They had to, to get by.
It didn’t matter to Father that most Cures were cautious of us because he didn’t care for company, and it didn’t matter to him that a couple of the curings became local folklore and got told over and over, getting longer and stranger each time.
Tabatha Sharpe, for instance.
She was a Cure of mine from when I was very young and first in the habit of going for walks near Sister Eel Lake. I’d play in the long pale grass, pulling it around myself and weaving a wheaten cradle. I laced the stalks over one another into thick and clumsy plaits in the way that some Cure women bound their hair, and lay there for an hour or so, imagining myself an infant Cure. Helpless. Speechless. Pursing my mouth to signal I wanted my mother’s teat.
Father had told me that Cures remember nothing of being inside their mothers, which I thought strange. I remembered so clearly my time in The Ground. I remembered the closeness of the soil and the taste of rain come down toward me.
Once the backs of my legs started itching I kicked away the cradle.
Shredded its walls.
Tore it down.
On the way home I played a game I often played when lazy with heat. It was a simple game: I’d look into Sister Eel Lake and convince myself I saw her there – whiskery, oily mouth – and so frighten myself into running all the way home.
I squatted in the rushes and felt my dress peel away from my back, waiting to be taken by surprise.
But then: a noise. A real noise. A noise I hadn’t spun in my head.
A wet, slipping sound, and a pocket of air dispersing.
There was a baby where there hadn’t been one before. A baby wrapped in a bit of cloth torn from a sheet or a large man’s shirt. The cloth was covered in stringy bits of blood and the baby was sickly. I lifted it into my lap and the small head rolled away.
Tiny throat. Too tiny to cry.
Little pink disk for a face, the features slightly flattened.
Fair hair plastered down with mucus and blood.
I checked it over, and saw it was a girl.
My first thought: Some crazed parent has left her here for Sister Eel.
Offerings were sometimes made to her by Cures who thought she could shimmy under the fields and make succulent the crops, though it was usually a calf or a fox they left for her.
With my arms around the baby I walked the quarter hour home, looking at her face.
Mouth like a berry still ripening.
Eyelids so thin I could see through them.
We’d no Cures scheduled that day, and so I knew there’d been an accident when I saw the old van parked at a hard, quick angle to the house.
A smell of wet was coming off the van, a sucked-penny smell, and once inside the house it wafted thick and strong. I followed it upstairs, an ache starting in my arms with the weight of the baby. I could hear Father talking.
They were in the third spare room – our best room, with its view of the garden’s greenest part. There was a woman in the rocking chair. She was crying, mostly with pain, and there was a man crying with sadness behind her. Father was on his knees. He said