And my father said: “You take her back right this goddamn minute.”
Thank you, Vic. You read my mind. It hits the spot on a fall day, doesn’t it? Go ahead, send it around. Have a swallow, all of you. This recipe came over with Vic’s family on the boat. It goes down smooth. Too smooth. See how that swallow treats you before you have more.
My stories have a tendency to spring leaks. I’ll think I’ve found a pretty clear way forward, and then I realize that I’m going to have to stop and explain something else first, and then it seems that explanation requires its own explanation, and pretty soon I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Or what metaphor I started with. Leaks, right? I’m not so good at plugging the leaks.
Like now, I’m remembering that moment with my father and this dark fury he had on his face as he looked at Violet, and how I was shocked by that, because my father wasn’t an angry sort of man, but not shocked, too. And to explain that contradiction, I’m tempted to explain my father to you. Of all the things I could say about him, for now, I’ll tell you this: my father was a fastidious man and a brilliant man, a scientist, and he laid the groundwork for everything we’ve managed to do here, but he had a cowardly streak. Or maybe that’s not fair. A coward wouldn’t have given up an in-zone vestment to do the work he was doing. But he knew the kind of good that was within his powers, and it wasn’t playing the hero. The loneliness of our lives out here was almost entirely his doing. When we saw people, we hid. We turned around and went the way we’d come. Always. Daddy saw it as his life’s mission to save the world, and he was never once struck by the irony that he trusted almost no one in that world he was so bent on saving. If I’d have asked him about that—and I never did, I never had the courage to—he’d probably have said that saving the world was the only way to make people trustworthy again. And there may be some truth in that.
Either way, it meant nothing to him that Violet was a child, that she’d suffered terrific hurts, that she had no one else. “Take her back,” he told me again, because I was standing there with her in my arms and I wasn’t moving, I hadn’t responded. It couldn’t have been long, but it felt like a long time. I remember my back was aching, and I wanted so much to put her down on my pallet in the big tent, but I had this sense that if I let her go Daddy would snatch her up and throw her away.
“Take her back,” he said again. I looked from him to my mother. She had an expression on her face that I could have drawn, I knew it so well. The eyebrows tilted up, like this, and her lips tight, and she was turning her hands in one another. She was the peacekeeper. She was the deciding vote, but she just about always cast her vote with my father, and in that way his word with us was as good as law. So when I said no—and that’s what I said, simple and flat as that—her eyes got big and unbelieving, and she said my name, but I just shook my head, hard.
“No,” I said. “I won’t. And if you won’t have her, you won’t have me, either. We’ll leave.”
Daddy said, “June, you don’t know what this means. You’ve got no idea what you’re doing.”
And I said, “Maybe not, but I know what I won’t do. I won’t leave her for dead.” I was crying at this point, and I didn’t even know why. Because a part of me wanted to be unburdened of her. I guess it was scary, how tempted I was to leave her sleeping where I’d found her and run. I was disgusted with myself. But also, I was disgusted with her. She terrified me. The sight of her ruined face on my collarbone terrified me. And so I dug in my heels, as if I weren’t terrified and disgusted. I said, “I will not.” I said it as though I didn’t doubt it, so as to make it true.
My father continued to argue with me. Telling me how close he was to a breakthrough in his work, how much there was at risk. I seem to remember Violet sleeping through it, or pretending to. And next I recall, the child was on my pallet, and my mother had brought me a cool soaked rag to put on her forehead. The two of us stood there together, looking down at her, and Mama said, “She’s going to break your heart.”
Truer words were never spoke.
In the evening, as the sun hid behind the mountains and the skeeters were nipping, Daddy came into my tent with a lantern, and he set it on the floor near Violet’s head. The child’s head. She was only “the child” to me then. “She’s still asleep?” he asked me. His voice was mild. All the rage had gone out of it.
I told him she’d been up for a little bit, long enough to have some water and a hoecake. Then she’d drifted off again.
He pointed at her little arms with his thick, blunt forefinger. “Stamp,” he said. He pointed again, and a third time, a fourth. “Stamp, Stamp, Stamp,” he repeated, and I said, “Yeah, so what?” I had a couple Stamps of my own, from long back. Both near my ankles. They glowed like white coins on my sun-brown skin. Daddy’s arms were dotted with them.
So he pointed to a couple of other scars—funny-shaped ones—on her arm again, and on the calf of her leg. “Those are from infestations,” he said. “You can tell from the scar pattern. They cinched her back together like a feed sack.”
And again, I was thinking, “So?” That wasn’t unheard of, either. Daddy’d had an infestation before I was born, though I sometimes forgot, because the scar was on his inner thigh and so I never had cause to look at it.
But I didn’t say anything out loud. I just waited for him to make his point. I knew he had one.
“All of these”—he motioned at her body—“all this I can account for,” he said. “She lived with folks. Folks with Stamps, so there’s some Zoner connection. And they used ’em liberally,” he said. He shook his head. He was exasperated. I only had a couple of scars because Daddy had insisted on throwing the Stamps out long ago. Even before his experiments had advanced. He always said that a Stamp was a fool’s cure. More harm than help. We kept our legs and arms covered, wore hats, and did regular body checks. We used a smelly salve Daddy concocted. And for the most part, that did the trick. I’d had some bites, but none of them led to infestations.
“But her face,” Daddy said. “There’s no accounting for it. The rest of her isn’t burned this way.” Then he drew more invisible lines with his big finger, this time along a curve on her forearm, then a knob along her shinbone. “Her arm’s been broken,” he said. “And her leg, too. That’s just what I see at a glance.” I saw then what he’d seen. How the parts of her had been roughly rejoined.
“Some kind of accident,” I said.
And my father said, “No.” He said, “No, whatever it was that happened to her happened on purpose.”