The Unfinished World (14 page)

After the séance, the women usually cry and the men shuffle their feet and look at the floor, and everybody calls Katie a miracle and gives her lots of money. She just smiles and smiles, my pretty sister, and all the while you can see her green eyes filling up with cash.

At bedtime Katie used to tell me stories about how we were, us people, a long time ago. How we were all holy once. How the earth was full of plenty, how everybody loved everybody, and how there was no sin. And how nobody went hungry, and how people were kind and gentle, even to the animals. And how a woman went and ruined it all for everybody else.

Ain't that just like a woman, I would say, and roll my eyes like Pa when he talks about god. And Katie would laugh, and pretend to cuff me, and instead she'd muss my hair and tell me to be off to bed. Ain't it just, she'd say, and she would smile the kind of smile she uses for the strangers who come to our place and do not ever leave it.

How it works is this: When a guest comes to stay the night, Ma and Katie string up the curtain splitting our little cabin in two. Pa and I bring the tables in, and Ma and Katie make them look real nice with clean white tablecloths and fresh cut wildflowers from the field out back. Ma makes a hearty dinner, with fried potatoes and steak and
soda biscuits, and a dried apricot pie for dessert. Katie brings out a glass of good whisky, wearing the kind of dress barmaids at the Blue Saloon would blush at. But Pa says it's for the greater good. He says everything is for the greater good, and that we shouldn't feel bad about these men, these fat, lonely men who worship nothing but money and god. I'm too afraid of Pa and his black pinprick eyes to ask him anything. But once I asked Ma what he worshipped and she scowled at me and said I was a fool. So I think maybe he doesn't worship anything, and I suppose that I don't either. Or maybe I just worship Pa. Maybe worship and afraid is the same thing.

Anyhow there's Katie in her tight blue bodice, making sure the men's eyes are on her all the time, and she's pouring whisky down their gullets. And there's me, opening the trapdoor right behind the chair and there's Pa, coming up swinging his sledgehammer, and there's Ma with the rope, binding their hands, and there's Katie with the big butcher knife, slicing the throat clean open just like you'd kill a hog. And I suppose in a way, they are like hogs, and ever since we all fell down from Eden we're animals, all of us, turning on each other every day. Only some folks like us Benders just do it more direct. Or maybe we're just better at it.

If we fell so long ago, Katie says, it could hardly be our fault that we went bad. But long ago seems like not that long ago to me. Long ago, Katie and I went to school, and we studied hard, and I thought maybe I would be a carpenter like Pa, or that maybe I would go into the army and learn to fight and use a gun. And long ago the world was small enough, and big enough, and we had friends and Pa did a good trade and even Ma would smile now and then. I'm not too sure when long ago became just now, but it happened too quick for me
to notice. I think sometimes maybe it was when Pa hurt his hand, or maybe it was when our little sister Susan died so sudden of the measles, or maybe it was when me and Katie started fainting, and the townsfolk started giving us the sideways eye. In any case, somewhere in between long ago and now, we learned how it works. We got smart.

How it works is this: They come for us at dawn, sun up like an egg, the raw, angry posse with fists around guns and torches and knives. We cleared out in time, because we're smart, we're Benders, and we're always one step ahead. We leave behind the bodies in the orchard and we take the money—some ten thousand by Pa's reckoning—and we light out in the wagon just before daybreak. Later they brag, that posse, they tell all kinds of tales: they found us and they beat us all to death; they found us and they skinned us all alive; they found us and they shot us all or burned us all or fed us all to starving coyotes. They gave us to the savages who beat time with our bones.

But none of this is true. How it works is this: We're always going to be one step ahead. We see things most folks can't. We see the dead, and we see the real ugly souls of the living. And we see better in the dark than you.

La Belle de Nuit, La Belle de Jour

T
his is the troubled edge of the kingdom. It is rumored that dragons sleep near, just off the coast of our dreams. Our days are short, and our troubles grow along with the darkness. We are alone and mad here in our isolation. We live in heaps of blight and scarce, scraggly vegetation, good for nothing but lighting our fires. Our trees are all dead; the branches crack and snap like brittle bones.

It was not always like this. Once this was a green place, full of memory and music. Once it was, perhaps not paradise, but clean, whole, a lively place at least. There was a sense that things were growing, becoming. There were so many rhymes then, so many songs, burbling up from the soil and rivers like laughter. I was training to be a singer myself, learning to sound both the new and also the ancient notes, learning to weave the stories of the kingdom's heroes into complex melodies. My brothers were learning to be great kings, like the kings of the days long past. There was a sense that the people were renewing themselves, and the people dreamed of a golden age come again to the world. On our days off, my brothers and I hunted and fished and swam and flew our kites. We took pictures
of one another, my eldest brother always pulling faces and making our parents laugh. On our favorite days, my youngest brother and I would drive to the great shore and feed the swans, watching them gracefully sail through water like small white ships.

But then one day the rumors reached us: a great and terrible witch was on her way. And the earth seemed to shrivel and wither. And the animals disappeared under the ground and over the hills. And one sad day, I stood in the doorway of our castle and watched the last of the birds winging away, the sky a pale and eerie red as they flew. Even our beloved swans left us.

Many of our people burned in the great fires, sacrifices to the gods that might stop the witch's coming. I always thought I would end up among them, there in the center of the cypress husks, but my father forbade me go and my mother was too ill to be alone with so many sons to care for. And so I watched my friends dance in the fires, falling one by one to ash as the skies grew gray and the smoke filled the heavens with haze. Of course it didn't work. She arrived just the same, stepping off the jet in her fur coat and sunglasses, a beautiful, haughty, horrible thing. We watched on TV, the cameras snapping away, her strange made-creatures ringing her like clay golems. When the cameras zoomed in, you could see the thumbprint on their foreheads, the dead, awful eyes, the huge hands. She waved to the curious crowds and smiled like Morgana, and got in her car and headed straight for our kingdom. We stopped dreaming that night for good. We started to fall under her spell, one by one, until only my brothers and I remained untouched.

And then, one horrible afternoon, just three days after we buried my mother, my father married Her. The queen of darkness,
la belle de nuit
, lady of the last days. She brought his soul through hell and fire and made it hers.

The first thing she asked for was the moon. Then the sky-stained stars. Then the canvas of the sky itself. My brothers rose up in anger at that, left in a pack to hunt and bring back a boar's head that looked like hers. They left me alone and I was angry, terrified. The eldest said they would be back soon, and smiled, and said not to worry. The youngest looked back at me, and frowned, and warned me to stay out of her sight while they were away. But that same afternoon she put deadly toads in my bath and snakes in my skirt. Only the warnings of the servants saved me. She poisoned my words so they left my lips as bees, stinging my throat and tongue so badly I thought I would die. And she reached out with her mild blue eyes and turned my brothers to seven wild swans, in mockery of the creatures that meant the most to us.

I went to my father, tried to plead with him, but the bees left my lips and my father, horrified, pronounced me a demon. She smiled, and nodded, and summoned her minions, those terrible dark hulking things. They circled me and grabbed me and their hands hurt like ice. They did terrible things to me, and when they had finished, they wiped the blood on their pinstriped trousers and drove my body to the shore. And there they released me, gave me to the waves to claim and keep.

But I was not dead, not quite. My breath rippled the water, my remaining fears flew straight up like a flare, a bright column of stars. I was mute and all alone, underneath the cold moon, on the deserted white road it shone over the sea. The thunder—hers or nature's, I could not tell—was deafening and I flung myself forward, seeing no land in sight, hearing no sound that could save me. At last, just before the end of my strength had come, I smashed against a tall rock, and I half-clambered, half-floated onto it and collapsed over its welcome solid stern.

Suddenly a single white feather landed beside me. As I gazed up, I saw seven swans winging down, furiously beating against the winds, coming to land neatly in a circle around me. I was surrounded again, but this time by my brothers, my poor, poor brothers, just boys, and how I wept to see them changed so, and how they wept to see me broken so, and how we stayed on that rock for many days, exhausted and alone and utterly devoid of hope or home. They brought me fish and fresh water to build back my strength, and the tears they wept healed my wounds and wore away my scars. And on the seventh day, I woke, healthy and whole, to find my brothers human and solemn and sleeping beside me.

I woke them, unable to speak for the spell on me, but shaking them and humming and grunting with a sort of primitive delight. My eldest brother shouted and smiled, but the youngest frowned and told me this would only last a day. On the last day of each month, he said, the witch had told him they would spend the day as humans once more—not out of kindness, but out of cruelty, so that they would always know the terrible thing that had happened and would remember the human bodies they could never possess again. We wept again this time, and yet again when I shook my head and tried to speak and the bees escaped their prison. We knew I must be parted from my brothers during the day, for they must hunt upon the water and I must live upon the land. And so they brought a cast-off fishing net, and carried me in it to the edge of the water, where I was able to stand and walk and search for a place to live. I found a sort of a cave at the edge, in a little grotto, and in it I made a home, as best I could, and spent the days sleeping and dreaming of music and sunshine and my brothers and I as we were. And at night I lay near the water, to watch over my brother-swans as they nestled their heads in their necks and floated their way to a sad, undreaming sleep.