“Or maybe,” she said, tossing another pebble down, “it leads to another world altogether.”
I leaned farther down, desperate to see, and Auntie grabbed the back of my dress and pulled me upright. “Be careful, Sara. Wherever it goes, I don’t think it’s anywhere you want to be.”
Clarence said Gertie was curled up at its bottom so sweetly, as if she’d just fallen asleep.
“She didn’t suffer,” Lucius said, his voice low and calm as he put his hand on top of mine. His hand was soft and powdery, not a callus or a scar on it. He was there when they hauled my Gertie out, and this seemed all wrong to me, that Lucius was there when they pulled her out, and not me. They sent Jeremiah Bemis down by rope, and he tied it round her waist. I closed my eyes. Tried not to imagine her small body swinging, banging against the curved wall of the well, as they hoisted her up out of the darkness.
“She died instantly,” Lucius said, as if it would be a comfort.
But it is no comfort. Because, over and over, I think of those stones I once dropped, and how long it took for them to reach the bottom.
I imagine what it must have been like, falling.
Surrounded by a circle of stone, falling, falling into the darkness.
Ruthie
The snowflakes were spinning, drifting, doing their own drunken pirouettes, illuminated by the headlights of Buzz’s truck. The studded tires bit into the snow, but he took the corners fast enough that they fishtailed dangerously close to the high snowbanks that lined the single-lane dirt roads.
“Turn off the lights,” Ruthie said, because they were close now, and she didn’t want her mother knowing she was out past curfew again. She was nineteen years old. Who did her mom think she was anyway, giving Ruthie a goddamn curfew?
Ruthie reached down, grabbed the bottle of peppermint schnapps that Buzz held between his thighs, and took a good slug of it. She rummaged through the pockets of her parka and pulled out the Visine, tilted back her head, and put three drops in each eye.
They’d been out partying at Tracer’s barn, finishing up the keg left over from the big New Year’s Eve bash. Emily had brought pot, and they’d huddled around the kerosene heater, talking about how much winter sucked and how everything was going to change in the spring. They’d all graduated the June before, and here they were, still stuck in West Freaking Hall, Vermont, the black hole in the center of the universe. All their friends had gone on to college, or moved to big cities in warm places: Miami, Santa Cruz.
It wasn’t that Ruthie hadn’t tried. She’d applied to schools in California and New Mexico, places with good business-administration programs, but her mother said that it wouldn’t work right now, that they just didn’t have the money.
They’d always lived pretty close to the bone, making ends meet by selling vegetables and eggs at the farmers’ market. Her mom sold hand-knit socks and hats there, too, and at craft shops and shows around the state. Her mother was big into bartering. They never bought anything new, and when something broke, they fixed it rather than replacing it. Ruthie had learned at a young age not to beg for stuff they couldn’t afford. Asking for a certain kind of sneaker or jacket just because all the other kids in her class had it earned her serious looks of disapproval and disappointment from her parents, who would remind her that she had perfectly nice things (even if they had come from the thrift store and had some other kid’s name written inside).
Ruthie’s mom decided it would be best if Ruthie stayed in West Hall and went to community college for a year; she even offered to pay Ruthie to help with the egg business. It was now her job to keep the books, feed the hens each day, gather the eggs, keep the coop clean.
“You want to study business, isn’t this a much more practical way to learn?” her mother had asked.
“Selling a few dozen eggs at the farmers’ market isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“Well, it’s a start. And with your father gone, I could use the extra help,” her mother had said. “Next year,” her mother promised, “you can reapply anywhere you’d like. I’ll help pay.”
Ruthie argued, said there were student loans, grants, and scholarships she might qualify for, but her mother wouldn’t fill out the paperwork, because it was just another way Big Brother was watching. The feds were not to be trusted, even when they were loaning money to college students. They’d get you caught up in the system, the very system her mother and father had worked so hard to stay free from.