Most of the crops have been harvested and are lying in barns and cellars. The extra puppies and kittens have been drowned in buckets of water and used as fertilizer. The lambs and kids will soon be sheep and goats, ready to be slaughtered, shorn, or milked. The netting is being taken down from paddocks. A delicate, sparkling layer of dead mosquitoes carpets the ground like an infestation of minuscule golden flowers.
At Caitlin’s house, Mother will be waiting, in an old dress that she doesn’t mind getting dirty. First Caitlin will stand out in front of the house while Mother digs her fingers into cracks in the mud covering her, peeling it away section by section like she is stripping the shell off a beetle. Then she’ll dump buckets of water over Caitlin’s head, until she is pink and naked and shivering. Only then will Mother wipe her with a towel and drop a dress over her head. Combing out Caitlin’s limp brown hair will take a few hours of wincing and grimacing from both of them. Then Caitlin will once again be bare and shiny, like she has been burned. At dinner, Father will be drunk and Mother and Caitlin will be careful. That night, she will lie awake in bed, half dreaming of muddy races and bare legs in the sand. When Father comes in and lays his hands on her, she will get up and walk over to the other side of the room. Crouching there, she’ll watch the girl on the bed and feel sorry for her. It’s always so hard for her to breathe, and she bruises so easily. When he’s done, Caitlin will fall asleep against the wall, and in the morning she will wake up back in bed. All the marks she’s watched him paint on another body will be on her own. She will go to school and try to hide the stains on her skin without success. He’s had a whole summer without her.
All the other children have given up, headed back home to be cleaned and dressed and put back in their place. Mother must be wondering where Caitlin is. But she can’t stop walking on the icy ground. Away from home, near the trees, around the shore.
Rounding a bend, Caitlin sees a group of men. She quickly darts behind a bush, its muddy branches camouflaging her easily. Caitlin’s body becomes colder as she squats still, her breath smoking in the chilly air. Peering through a spray of mud-caked leaves, she sees the wanderers, a cluster of them, all wearing dark clothes. Two are in the water, pulling something to shore. They killed a sea monster, thinks Caitlin, and now they’re going to butcher the body.
A gathering of wanderers all together, rising from the sea. Like tall, dripping crows, they shift in a rough circle. Faint masculine voices, voices of command, carry in the wind. She can’t understand why, but of all the things Caitlin has ever seen in her life, this is the most terrifying.
Creeping closer, shivering, she squints to see what they’ve found. They’ve pulled the thing onto shore now, their circle tightening around it.
Two dark-clad bodies part, and through the brush, Caitlin sees a blue-white, limp hand and arm. A fall of dirty hair. Blue lips and blue fingers. One of the men presses down, and the indigo lips part to eject a gush of dirty water. The eyes stare, dead and white like pebbles. One of the wanderers—Mr. Joseph?—kneels down and pushes the hair back, gently closes the eyes with his fingertips. Another one kicks the sand and throws his long arms out, his terse volley of words jumbling into nonsense on the wind.
They put their heads together again, their arms on one another’s backs, muttering. Then two stride off away from her while two others kneel at the body’s ankles and shoulders. Hoisting it, struggling under its sodden weight, they follow the men who left. Five wanderers stand on the beach, looking at each other, looking down, making comments. One seems to be delineating something to the others. A stray wanderer, a little back from the rest, raises his head and, Caitlin is sure, looks right at her.
Someone grabs Caitlin by the throat and jerks her backwards in time.
They are pulling a dead woman by her feet from a swath of white sheets, revealing slack legs of violet and blue flesh. Slowly they peel bleached cloth from her, layer upon layer, until she lies naked and exposed, a rotten stamen at the heart of a stripped lily, sprawled lifeless on a pile of snowy petals. Her feet are near Caitlin’s face, thick blue toenails like pieces of ceramic, delicate layers of dead skin peeling back in halos from the heels. Caitlin is not supposed to be there, and so she does not say anything, and hunches near the bed, pretending to be invisible.
She can hear sobbing, a woman, and the angry words of a man. The trickling of water into a bowl. Two female hands are washing the body. The washing woman’s swift but tender movements make a soft sound that ends with a flourish at the apex of each stroke. Caitlin is sure if she got very close to a bird unfurling its wings, it would make the same sound. The woman squeezes the cloth into the bowl and the water swirls crimson and pink. Then the sounds start again. The bird brandishes its wings over and over, never quite taking flight. Moving in little jerks, Caitlin slowly raises her head over the top of the bed and sees the dead woman’s slack breasts falling to each side, the riotous garden of bruises under her skin, the way her flesh gives like old meat in advance of the cleaning strokes.
Hands land on Caitlin’s shoulders, unfriendly hands. “What’s this brat doing here?” asks someone with incredulity.
“Learning life’s lessons,” says a woman tartly.
“No, come now, she shouldn’t see this, not yet,” another woman replies, and Caitlin is picked up and hurled outside the room, onto a dusty wooden floor.
Caitlin returns to herself with a croak, staggering, and falls to her hands and knees to gasp for breath. She puts her hands to her throat and whirls to look behind her, but nobody is there. Turning back, she freezes. The wanderers are still in sight, one raising his head to look back for the source of the strange sound. Panic floods her groin with sick heat, branching through her bones until her fingertips burn. She feels hot, salty urine lick her thigh. Caitlin takes off running, convinced that if they see her they will kill her. But the dead girl’s face is burned into her memory, as much as she tries to wipe it clean. The blue hand beckoning her, the head turned to the side with its eyes open. The belly humped convex, pasted with wet cloth. The dark blue mouth a scar in front of Caitlin’s eyes. The wanderers, flocked around her like hungry birds of prey, and the small smile on the girl’s face that says, You can do nothing to me. Caitlin feels something like jealousy burn deep in her gut.
Then she’s in front of her house, which is still dirty and falling down. She stands, a lone, small, muddy figure, staring at the structure rearing up before her like a nightmare. She suddenly feels the weight of Amanda’s corpse slump onto her shoulders, heavy and cold and wet, and she staggers. Dropping to her knees, she puts her head down as if in prayer and waits for someone to notice her.
Chapter Twenty
Janey