Her skirt-tails ajostle, Evavangeline heard leaves rattle in the branches. She heard a horse nicker. A shutter bang open. The chickens started to cluck. Wind picked up and her hair stood on end and the breeze cooled her scalp. A light flickered on inside the shack and somebody screamed and the baby began to squall. Lightning cracked the starless dome of space and showed the powderhorn of black air weaving over the cotton destroying all in its wake, barbed wire whipping and rocking chairs and corn cribs and cows and large snakes raining down, the funnel’s great endhole snorting the face of the land, the grass on the cabin’s roof standing and then the roof still in its shape rose and folded like a letter. And one by one among floating chairs and washpots the flailing enemies of Alice Hanover’s customers rose screaming, even the naked baby and its doll made of corn shucks. Shorn from the baby’s hands, the doll turned a child’s eternity in the air then landed at Evavangeline’s feet like a gift.
For a moment she considered it. She picked it up.
——, said Alice Hanover and unscrolled her smoking fingers.
Thus Evavangeline handed over the only toy she had ever touched.
Alice Hanover held it aloft in her flat palm like someone freeing a dove and let the wind claim it and the girl watched the scrub of doll lift from the gypsy’s fingers into the air and striptease apart a shuck at a time until the lightning stopped and the wind died and the doll lay scattered in places unseen.
Later she lay awake on the ground by the wheel of Alice Hanover’s wagon where she slept each night. She knew the gypsy was above, in the covered buckboard asleep on her ticking with her eyes open, and that she must move quick else the old crone would kill her with a grunt before Evavangeline could draw the blade over that warty throat and unriver its blood. She would never be able to do it, to get in the wagon, sink the knife. The gypsy was too wily. Evavangeline lay like a bruise on the cold skin of the earth, her ear to its dirt, her teeth clenched so tightly she could hear the ocean a hundred miles south, while above her the wagon planks creaked as Alice Hanover endured her slumber.
Evavangeline raised her fingers to the underside of the wagon’s floor but didn’t touch it. She felt the old woman’s heat through the boards. She moved her fingers to the left, to the right. She pointed to a spot and jibbed her knife between the boards and through the old woman’s ticking and her skin. Her onion of a heart. There was a squawk and lightning struck nearby. The knife kicked itself from between the boards and fell to the grass steaming. The wagon pitched and yawed and the night spoke words Evavangeline tried her best not to hear. It rained then snowed. The ground shook. Trees broke in half and fell all around. Worms squirted out of the dirt.
Then everything grew quiet and still. Blood ran between the boards and covered the girl, afraid as she was to come out.
She waited. And waited.
She stayed there hardening in witchblood for three days until hunger like a father’s foot drove her back into the world. And weeks, months, years, later, now and again, with a huffing man driving her across the mattress or the ground, she would whisper two or three of the words of Alice Hanover. ——she would say. —— ——. The man would pause, breath held as the air changed, and say, What in the hell.
Then, because she never recited all the words in their right order, the air would move again and the man would resume his thrusting and she would pinch bloody crescents in the skin of her arm to assure herself that this was real and she was alive and—
You killed him, didn’t you? the dyke said.
She stood backlit in the door holding a pair of boots in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Killed who? Evavangeline asked. She sat up.
My husband, said the dyke. These is his boots.
Evavangeline folded her arms. Well hell Mary, she said. I might jest did. Killed him I meant. What did he look like?
The boots hit the floor. He was a veteran!
Evavangeline leaned forward, her eyes gleaming in the light from the door. Was he also a crow hunter and a raper?
Sometimes! the woman shrieked. When he drank the devil’s whiskey he loved to kill things! And rape them! But if he’s dead and you ain’t gone stay, then I got to feed all these younguns myself!
What about all that cane?
It’s dried out. It’s dead. We lost ever thing. Tate ’ll foreclose on us less we git some money, fast.
Whose children did I see earlier?
My husband rounded em up to sell. He’s supposed to deliver em tomorrow. But that ain’t none of ye business.
The dyke raised her pistol but Evavangeline was already behind her. She kneed her in the kidney and the dyke turned, tearing Evavangeline’s shirt and clawing at her eyes but the girl bit a swatch out of the dyke’s neck and shoved her against a wall and clubbed her with a chamber pot when she bounced back and watched her sink in the corner. She bound and gagged the dyke then put her own clothes and the crow hunter’s boots back on and crept through the house holding the pistol in one hand and an oil lamp in the other. She found the children sleeping on the floor in a room and woke them one by one and waited for them to put on their shoes, the ones who had them, and led them outside past the dyke and through the yard into the root cellar, slapping the oldest boy’s hand from her ass.
Yall stay here, she said to them, till jest fore morning. If ye have to take a piss, use that stew pot yonder. Come first light yall find ye way home.
You a whore? the oldest boy asked. He had the blondest hair.
None ye business, she said. What’s ye name?
William R. McKissick Junior. My daddy was the bailiff over in Old Texas fore Mister E. O. Smonk killed him. I lit out cause I heard it was a woman who took in orphans and would let you screw the girls. The boy cast an evil eye on the children. But so far won’t none of these here ones screw and they ain’t fed us yet. I got me half a mind to git on.
Evavangeline knelt. She took his hard shoulders in her hands and looked in his eyes. She could see he had an erection by the way his pants stood.
If I goose ye one time, she said to him, will ye do something for me?
Ma’am?
If I take care of that there, she said, thumping his britches, will ye then repay me with a promise?
Oh, yessum! he cried.
She led him to a dim recess in the cellar. It smelled like potatoes. The other children followed and watched. She undid his pants and squirted him into the darkness. He made a croaking noise.
Now, ye promise, she said.
He seemed drunk, a sleepy smile, string of drool. Yessum.
From here on, you’ll watch after these here other younguns. Help em get home and don’t let nothing happen to any of em. And don’t try to screw em neither.
But—
Just do like I told you. Get em out of here fore first light.
Yessum, the boy said. Can ye do me that way one more time?
My lord. She reached forward and it was waiting for her, still bouncing from its rapid rise.
7 THE TENANTS
ON SMONK’S TRAIL, MCKISSICK AND GATES HAPPENED UPON A small flat-topped log barn dobbed with straw mortar and cotton, a thin man centered in its door whacking a wagon axle with a hammer. He stopped and rose from his haunches still holding the hammer and stood in the shade watching them walk up on the horse.
This here’s Smonk’s tenant farm, McKissick said. Which would make that feller Smonk’s tenant.
How ye know? asked the blacksmith from behind him on the horse.
Never mind. It’s a few things I know.
You ain’t gone shoot him, are ye?
Not if I don’t have to. Pipe down.
