Chapter Four
1893–1894
Invisible Knots
The following June, I turned thirteen, an unlucky number. I was becoming a young woman. Mother showed me how to fashion my hair into a neat, low chignon instead of a braid down my back. My hips and breasts grew, and although I would never be a violin, I was no longer a flute. These changes didn’t bother me. But other changes did.
When the harvest began, not long after, a slight adjustment was made to the bargain we had made with Silas. He and his wife continued to rent the house in town, but because their son Ray spent long days working on the farm, someone decided—it was never clear who—that he should come live in the farmhouse with us.
Ray was sixteen that summer. Before he moved into the farmhouse with us, I could count on a single hand the number of times I had seen him. All I knew of him was that in childhood he’d narrowly escaped dying of a fever that had carried away his three younger sisters. Whether the fever had made him more precious or he had always been so, his parents fawned over him like a little prince. Like Victor, he worked for Silas as a general farmhand; unlike Victor, he seemed perfectly suited to it. He was built for physical labor, his arms and legs as thick as tree trunks. You could see his mother in the pale hair and aquiline nose, his father in the broad frame and cleft chin. His head was topped with an unruly crop of blond curls. As the summer went on, they got blonder in the sun. In the evenings, he ruined the triangular pleasure of our after-dinner entertainment by sitting in a chair and staring silently.
I admit that I disliked him from the beginning, before I had much reason to do so. I’d caught my mother’s attention but feared I could lose it again at any moment, so I didn’t want his competition. In the beginning, he spoke so rarely that I thought perhaps the fever had left him touched in the head. Therefore I was equally annoyed whether he stared at a spot on the floor, or at my mother’s hands on the cello, or—as he most often did—at me.
As the weeks went on, it seemed that he was always nearby, always lurking. The character of his attention changed. Every interaction with him was fraught. I would pass through the hall toward my room, flushed and exhausted from a solid hour of rigorous pirouettes. He would appear soundlessly to block my path, the sour tang of a day’s sweat on him, forcing me to stop short. He wouldn’t touch me. He reached out as if to lay his palm against the side of my cheek but then would pause just an inch or two away. He stared into my left eye, the flawed one, as if he could unlock a secret from it by staring. I blinked as little as I could. He didn’t say a word, and when I stepped away, he let me go.
I thought I might mention it to my mother, but what could I say? It sounded silly to complain that he sometimes looked at me and, on occasion, almost touched me.
It sounds silly even now. Even now that I know what was coming.
***
For my birthday, my mother had bought me a rather extravagant gift. It cost enough that I later heard her and Victor arguing about it, him cursing that it was too much money, which it no doubt was. The gift was the tallest mirror I’d ever seen, a breathtakingly flat and large piece of silvered glass in which I could see the reflection of nearly my entire body. My room was otherwise unadorned, only a faded hand-me-down quilt on the bed and a thin gray rug covering perhaps a third of the floor, so the mirror seemed all the more remarkable. The oval frame was dark wood, simple and lovely, with a subtle pattern of carved leaves. Mother insisted that it would help me correct my posture and perfect my positions. It did both of these things, but I also just liked to look in it and see myself, examining the tiniest details of my own appearance. I stared at the shape of my earlobes, one of which seemed ever so slightly higher than the other, and at the faint short hairs along my hairline, which stirred with my breath. I could finally see how odd my eye looked, how clear the dividing line was between the brown and the blue. I could see the speckles of shifting color in the iris and watch the pupil grow larger when the sunlight from the window faded at dusk. I brought my face so close to the mirror my breath fogged its surface, then made a game of holding my breath to see how long I could keep it clear.
My pleasure in the mirror outlasted its novelty. Even three months later, when I was back in the daily routine of attending school, I often wished I was at home with the mirror instead. My behavior in the classroom grew worse, and my reputation with it. Mother was informed of my unwillingness to comply with the rules. I couldn’t puzzle out how she felt about it. In front of the young teacher, she told me this misbehavior couldn’t continue and promised I would be disciplined. In private, she said nothing. At the dinner table, she only told Victor that the classroom seemed to be run by a recent winner of the Harlan County Jump Rope Championship, and it was too bad the schools here weren’t better. When Silas’s wife remarked one evening that she had heard I was a discipline problem at the school, my mother replied archly that the brightest children were known for being the most unruly, then changed the subject to the weather.
So I continued to comply with my teacher’s directions when it suited me and do otherwise when it didn’t. More than once, this led to a punishment where I was placed in the corner of the classroom and made to raise my arms while holding a book in each hand. This had no deterrent effect whatsoever, since it was an exercise that strengthened my arms for dancing, and my mother complimented the improved elegance of my arm positions in fourth and fifth.
One afternoon, when I had become so annoyed with the remedial nature of the reading lesson that I simply got up and walked out of the school, I snuck back into the house and headed upstairs. I was so focused on keeping my footsteps silent to avoid detection that I didn’t see that Ray was in my room, standing in front of the mirror, until I was a few feet from his elbow.
Ray had a straight razor in his hand and was drawing it along his abdomen, making a long shallow cut, and little beads of blood were beginning to well up from the flesh.
I breathed in.
His eyes opened wide and met mine in the mirror. I lowered my gaze. His cotton shirt was unbuttoned and open down the front, and in his reflection, I saw them all. Scars. Scars that followed the lines of his ribs, outlining them in ghostly white, so you could see the shape of the skeleton underneath his skin. He had cut himself again and again, neatly and deliberately, over and over. How long would something like that take, I wondered. Months? Years?
“Get out,” he said, almost growling.
“It’s my room,” I said hotly. “You get out.”
He spun and grabbed my arm with his free hand, the other hand clutching the open, gleaming razor. The blood began to run down his skin but did not drip.
“You keep this to yourself,” he said. “You understand?”
I forced myself only to shrug.
He lay the flat of the razor against the bare skin of my forearm, then my neck, then my cheek. The metal was cold. The ripe odor of his sweat swarmed up around me in a cloud.
“You will keep this to yourself,” he repeated.
“I will?”
“If you tell your mother what you saw, I’ll tell her that you invited me here to your room to seduce me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, keeping my eyes locked with his so I wouldn’t look down at the blade and panic. I didn’t think he meant to hurt me, just scare me, but I also knew his hand could easily slip.
“Is it? You’re a lonely girl. I’m a handsome boy.”
“Are you?”
He laughed. “As you like. You’re an insolent girl. I’m a well-behaved boy. I do what I’m told and you don’t. You shouldn’t even be here. Who would they believe?”
I was uncertain of the answer. He never misbehaved, not that anyone caught him at. I was a known troublemaker. My mother had defended me when it suited her, but this was more serious. Certainly she knew something about young girls misbehaving, or I wouldn’t exist.
And the longer Ray stared at me, the less sure I was that he didn’t mean me harm. There was something in his eyes. The intensity of his gaze was becoming almost too much. I forced myself not to look away.
“Now that would be a lie, of course,” he continued. “You seducing me.”
“Yes, it would.”
He tilted his head and gave me an appraising look. “I wouldn’t mind a tumble, of course, if you’re inclined.”
“No, thank you.”
“Lord, blades do make people polite, don’t they?”
An answer didn’t seem necessary. The steel on my cheek was no longer cold. It had drawn its heat out of my skin.
“Do you believe in magic?” he asked abruptly.
“No.”
“I do. I think everyone has a little. I’m trying to find mine. And yours.”
“I haven’t got any.”
“You don’t know that, not for sure.”
I needed an angle. I tried one. “So what do you think yours is? Your magic?”
“Not sure yet. Something to do with healing. I survived a sickness I shouldn’t have survived. It killed my sisters, but it spared me. Don’t you think that’s a clue to something?”
I let my eyes flicker down toward the razor, still against my cheek. “Seems you’re more likely to hurt than to heal.”
He smiled at that and let the razor drop. I didn’t let the relief show.
“Hurting and healing are two sides of the same coin,” he said.
“A funny coin.”
“You’ll understand someday. For all your faults, you’re a quick learner. We’ll talk more about this, someday soon.”
He folded his razor, wiped the blood from his torso with a cloth from his pocket, and buttoned his shirt back up to the neck. And then he left me there. I listened to his footsteps grow fainter and fainter, the thump of work boots going down the stairs and across the floor, and when the sound of the front door closing finally came, I let out the sigh I’d been holding so close.
I looked in the mirror. No one would be able to tell I had just been terrorized. Everything about me was exactly as it should have been, except for three faint marks. In the three places he had touched me with the razor’s blade—the arm, the neck, the cheek—there was a thin line of blood, not my own.
The marks were a simple matter to wipe away.
He was right, of course. I was too scared to say a word. I didn’t think I’d be believed. And besides, what had really happened? He’d done more damage to himself than to me.
That time.