Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Eighteen

At four-twenty a.m. a shock hits the house and almost knocks me out of my bed. The moon is up and I can see snow flying parallel to the ground. Then something hits the house again, shaking snow off the roof, sending a load straight down past my window, thudding like lead when it hits the flower bed and wheelbarrow and coiled garden hose that has frozen as solid as concrete from the water I left in it.

I go downstairs and look through the back kitchen window. A little girl in a thin lavender dress without a coat or hat or shoes is looking back at me from the center of the yard, her blond ringlets touching her shoulders, her short, puffed, lace sleeves exposing most of her arms. The prints of her bare feet on the lawn lead back to the chicken house, which is built onto the side of the barn. I pull a coat off a peg in the mudroom and go down the back steps into the windstorm.

“What’s your name, little girl?” I ask.

Mary, she says.

“Are you lost?”

No.

“What are you doing here?”

Looking for Fannie Mae. I can’t find her.

“How do you know my daughter, Miss Mary?”

She saw me playing with the animals and showed me how to make their shapes with my hands in front of a lamp. Want to see?

“What were you doing in the chicken house?”

Playing. Can I come in your house?

“If you’ll let me take your picture. Otherwise no one will believe you’ve been here.”

She looks sideways and seems to frown.

“Did I make you mad?” I ask.

I don’t like being dead. Where is Fannie Mae?

“She comes and goes. Can I do something for you?”

I saw you shooting at a soldier.

“He was killing the Indians, Mary. Little children.”

Don’t talk bad about the soldiers.

“Let me go in the house and find a coat for you.”

I don’t care about coats. Fannie Mae was supposed to wait for me. Then she ran off. I don’t like that.

“That doesn’t sound like Fannie Mae,” I say.

You think you’re smart? Listen to this: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row.”

“I’m cold, Mary. Come inside with me. I bet you’re hungry.”

Did you hear the poem or not? The silver bells are thumbscrews. The cockleshells put the squeeze on the prisoner’s private parts. The queen of England used those things on the people she hated.

“You shouldn’t talk about things like that.”

Aunt Ruby has to release the Old People.

“I’m not sure you’re her niece, little girl.”

You better watch how you talk. Watch this.

She stands on the tips of her toes in the frozen grass and stretches her arms toward the sky and speaks in a language I cannot understand. The snow in the air and the snow on the ground begin to swirl, forming a funnel that peels the remaining ice and snow off the roof and scoops up the topsoil and the bricks that border the flower beds and spins all of it cyclonically, along with the frozen garden hose that is now as supple as a snake and straightening like a whip. Mary snatches the hose from the funnel and points the nozzle at the carpet of frozen green grass and uses it like a welder’s torch and burns the date July 4, 2012, into the sod.

Then she’s gone and the funnel disappears and everything inside it clatters to the ground. There is no sound other than the door to the chicken house squeaking in the wind. I cross the lawn, the grass like spikes under my shoes, and go inside the chicken house. The walls and floor are splattered with blood and feathers and wings torn from the chickens’ dead bodies. The stench is unbearable, its rankness far more stringent and feral than that of blood and feces alone. The only odor I remember like it came from body bags on a six-by that was blown off the road by a land mine south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel and left in a ravine for a week in ninety-degree heat. But even that doesn’t quite describe it. I think of a brothel area in a town on the Gulf Coast where I lived many years ago, and I think about the ditch behind the cribs where the whores emptied their buckets in the early-morning hours, and I think about the stink rising from that ditch as well as the smoke from the sugar refinery and the raw garbage burning in the trash barrels behind the cribs and the occasional sheets and tick mattresses that would be stacked on the fires and the salty smell like rotten fish that seemed to live in the soil. The stench of all these things would flatten in the wind and hang in a gray cloud over the shacks of Black people, then seep into the white part of town, at which time the sheriff would send inmates from the parish prison with cans of kerosene to set the ditch aflame.

I pull my coat over my nose and back out of the chicken house and clear my throat and spit, then go in my house and open a bottle of mouthwash and gargle with it and spit it in the sink. My armpits are looped with sweat. I left the chicken house door open, and now feathers are blowing in the yard and a fox is standing in the doorway with a chicken’s head in its mouth. I do not want to accept what has happened in the last fifteen minutes. Nor do I wish to tell anyone about it. I lie down on the couch, shivering under a blanket, and watch the dawn crawl over the mountains. I refuse to close my eyes until the sun has driven the darkness from my house and my land and my trees and my animals and I am sufficiently safe to let sleep have its way.

One hour later, I wake in an embryonic ball, my arms clasped around my head, wondering where my daughter has gone.