“Not yet,” says the coyote.
“Not yet,” she concedes. Then, kissing the crown of Sylvie’shead, “But if we cross, we’ll both be safe? She won’t die?”
“You won’t die,” says the coyote.
“It’s not me that I care about.”
“She belongs here,” says the coyote. “You are marked foranother world, and you have known it since before you arrived.”
Ana knows he does not mean the world of labor camps anddocumentation papers. The warriors, the mothers, and the drowned ones, shemouths through heat-cracked lips. Beneath her, the coyote feels swollen withhunger.
“I can’t leave her,” she says, looking across the vastshining expanse of the river.
“Then make her suitable for the other world,” says thecoyote.
She slides off his back, holding Sylvie close to her chest.Atop a creature forged from deathlessness, the thought of drowning her daughteris too awful, too tempting. “Don’t say that. I want her to live. I want her tolive with me. I don’t want to spend fifty years in another world while she’s inthe land of the dead—I don’t care which land of the dead.”
“You have no other choices,” says the coyote.
How terrible that would be, if she believed him. Is thereanything she would not do for Sylvie now? Any boundary she would not cross, anyimpossibility she would not make possible?
“I want to become a nagual,” she says. “Like you.” Ather back, the river beats against the shore. The other side is close, but shewants nothing of it if her daughter is not beside her.
“That, you cannot do,” says the coyote. Beneath his peelingskin and rust-colored fur, she sees, he is only a spindly frame of bone.
“You told me how.” She tears a stalactite from the sand andapproaches him. Her hands shake but she is calm with Sylvie tucked up againsther heart in a makeshift sling. “You said that everything here is an exchange.”
◊
Loping across the land of the dead with Sylvie on her back,past the aspen trees, the crow’s skins, the golems, Ana counts up the dead andincludes herself among them. There are candles lit in skulls beside the road atnight now, and sparse stalks of sugarcane sticking out of the barren earth.Sometimes she wonders if the sheer force of Sylvie’s life might resurrect thedead land. Certainly, it is not the force of her own deathlessness.
She has not yet found the boundary between surviving in theland of the dead and becoming one of its inhabitants. With her ridged spine andfangs, she might well have lost her citizenship to the other world already. Butshe is not the most savage creature here. The monsters would frighten her ifshe did not see the potential in them. She teaches her daughter how to put ontheir costumes, to wrap herself in their pelts and imitate the cries they makewhen hunting. Their power will be Sylvie’s inheritance when she no longer has amonster for a mother. Because Ana knows she has not really secured deathlessnessfor herself. Someday there will be another desperate woman with a gun to herhead and a mule that won’t go on running, another blood-covered hand andknife-pierced eye and, at the riverside, another killing blow.
They are scavengers of death, the nagual. It would befoolish for them to think they will not be picked off by some equallyformidable predator.
Too Lonely, Too Wild
“AND ONCE she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her—
And didn’t answer—didn’t speak—
Or return.”
Robert Frost, “The Hill Wife”
For a while, you couldgo anywhere and find them. Old Mr. Miellon’s movie-star-beautiful wife in herblue plastic halo of curlers, scrubbing her cheeks with lye in the morning andmilk at night. Annabelle Leahy flying down the dirt road to meet her steadyafter school, throat hoarse and knees scraped-up from hurrying. The new Mrs.Donahue, a traveling salesman’s city-born daughter, hammering down fence postsand wading through chicken shit.
Grammy would yank me along before I could see much,muttering, “Protect her, Lord, from their coins and their nails.” I thoughtthose women must be demons; I didn’t know they were in love.
At home, she’d crack open the family Bible and readwise-woman prayers over me, consecrating, building walls. “Let my granddaughternever be a wife in this goddamn town,” she’d say, and I was so little that Irecognized neither the cursing nor the curse in the words.
When Grammy died I was twelve. I had no mother and no fatherbut I did have seventeen dollars and my great-grandmother’s stiff husk of awedding dress and the family Bible, which waited ten years in a carpetbag forthe day that Mr. Rishner married me.
◊
Some folks said Mr. Rishner once had a crop yield so rich thathe still hid sacks of gold beneath his bed. Others said he was a water witchand he’d dowsed for his fortune in the swamp with a forked stick. You could seehis house tucked into the hills all the way from town, a hard-glinting whitebead inside a yellow-gray wall of wheat.
Our courtship was maybe fifteen words long. He said no moreto me than he said to anyone else and I said more than enough for us both,which wasn’t much at all. We both knew what we were aiming for. I wanted toclimb up into the hills and disappear from the eyes of everyone who knew Ididn’t inherit Grammy’s witching power. And he wanted a wife. What did any manwant?
We were as dead silent married as we’d been courting. Heleft for the fields before sunup. I stayed inside the white house, shucked morebeans and salted more pork than we could hope to eat, and when I had done withthat, scrubbed everything twice. If he still wasn’t home by then, I’d go out tothe porch, and smoke a cigarette and shut my eyes and listen to the longspurssing so I could hear something besides quiet swelling in my head to noise.
After he came home, we’d sit on the stoop and watch the skyarrange and rearrange all its layers of smoke-colored fleece while birds fussedin the dying trees. In November, when the dark came before dinner did, the lastlongspur flew away, and something collapsed
