Of course there were rumors: people hissed that Agnes was a whore and a hedge-witch, that she cursed the ewes to lamb out of season and lay down with devils before running off to the city to fornicate.
“No.”
Agnes grunts, very nearly amused, then sighs long and slow. “Well. It’s no secret now: I got myself in a family way. You remember Clay, the Adkins boy?”
There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.
“Sure I remember him.”
“Well, he and I . . . I was lonely and he was nice enough, and one thing led to another.” Her voice goes young and soft. “Mags figured it out before I did.”
Juniper thinks of all the girls she used to see slinking across the back acres to Mags’s house, looking for the words and ways to unmake the babies in the bellies. Not all of them young or unwed—some were too old for childbearing or too sick, or had too many hungry mouths already. Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Agnes is rubbing her thumb over the ball of her belly now. “She . . . helped me. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurting. Like shedding a skin, coming out brighter and bigger. Afterward I buried it beneath a hornbeam on the east side of the mountain, and I thought that was the end of it. I told the Adkins boy to get gone and stay that way. I thought nobody would ever know.”
Juniper remembers all her daddy’s lectures on Eve’s curse and original sin, descending into slurred rambles about weak-fleshed women and their whoring ways. She remembers his eyes gleaming red in the gloom in the barn, his bones showing white through stretched-taut skin, and begins to understand. “How did he find out?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Not a soul except Mama Mags.” Agnes’s mouth twists, venom in her voice. “And Bella, of course. I told her everything back then.”
“She never—”
“She did. I was watering the horses because Mags said it was fixing to freeze overnight.” Crow County slinks back into her voice, sly and drawling. “Then Daddy turns up and I could see in his face that he knew, about me and Clay, about the pennyroyal and the thing beneath the hornbeam. And then I saw Bella creeping along behind him, all pasty white, and I knew what she’d done.”
Juniper wants to argue. She remembers the feel of her sisters’ hands in hers on summer evenings, the circle they made between them; the promise that was never said aloud but was woven in their hair, written in their blood: that one would never turn against the other. Surely Bella would have died before she broke that trust.
But then Juniper recalls the cold gray of her sister’s eyes, the secrets she keeps safe in her notebook, and stays quiet.
“I told him it wasn’t true, that Bella was a liar and a—” Agnes swallows hard, skips over something. “But he just kept walking toward me. He wasn’t even in his cups—sober as a judge, I’d swear. But he was looking at me like—like . . .”
Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place. Juniper had seen that look. She came running into the barn, tangle-haired, sap-sticky, arms scored by the reaching fingers of the woods, and saw her sisters huddled against the far wall. Her father prowling toward them like a wolf, like a man, like the end of days—
And then—
That unseen thing swims too close to the surface and Juniper looks away. She goes someplace else instead, cool and green.
Agnes calls her back. “Juniper. June, baby.” Juniper returns to the pretty wallpapered room, to the sister who watches her with wide eyes.
Juniper bridles at the pity in that look. “What?”
Agnes takes up her story like a woman knitting past a dropped stitch, leaving a gaping hole behind her. “You remember the fire, don’t you?”
For a sick second Juniper thinks Agnes means the second fire, the one she set the night she ran north, before she recalls the shatter of her daddy’s lantern as he fell, the spit of oil across dry straw and old timbers, the weeks and weeks of changing bandages and coughing up globs of char and blood.
“Of course I do.” She falters a little. “But I don’t remember . . .” How she survived. How could she remember the inside of the barn as it burned—the rafters bright gold above her, the hideous screaming of the horses, the wet snap of flesh—without remembering how it ended?
“When I was younger I was always burning my fingers when I took the pot off the stove.” Agnes sounds like she’s treading carefully. “Mags gave me some words and ways to keep me safe. I didn’t know if they’d do any good, but Daddy was blocking the door and I still had the water for the horses . . . I threw it in a circle around the three of us and said the words, and it worked. Nearly.” Her eyes flick to Juniper’s left foot, then away, gray with guilt. “Daddy reached in after you, but we didn’t let him take you.”
Juniper always thought her scars look like split branches or spreading roots. Now she can see they look more like the fingers of a burning hand.
“Somebody must have heard the horses or seen the smoke. They dragged us all out, piled wet earth over Daddy to put out the flames. Mags took you away—you were all hot and
