“Yes,” she said.
“You still want to be part of the group going to Lenoir tomorrow? Are you up for it? Honey, are you behind us?”
“Yes,” Violet said. “I want to go. And yes, I’m behind you.”
“I’m glad, honey,” June said. She looked to Violet, briefly, like an elderly version of herself. “I’m glad.”
After lunch, Violet returned to her bed at the bunkhouse. She was tired, so tired. Afternoons were the worst for that lately—around 1:00, 2:00, she started to feel as if she were not walking but wading, and her limbs ached dully from the effort. The bunkhouse was empty, the others still out at the fields, probably eating their packed lunches now, perched in the shade of the flowers, brown young legs tangled up together. The thought didn’t make her angry, or wistful, as it once it had. She begrudged them nothing. Not their youth, not their beauty. Violet had something else, something better.
She lowered herself to her mattress with a sigh and nudged off her boots, toe to heel. It was sweet to lie down. And she needed to think hard about what was to come, but first a nap. She drew a light blanket over herself, nestled into her pillow. Sunlight printed hazy dots against her closing eyelids.
Before she drifted off—by habit, by reflex—she put down her hand and wormed her fingers under the fitted sheet, nails catching the edge of the slit she’d carved into the mattress about a month ago. She pushed her fingers in, flexing until her middle finger touched it: the edge of the seed pouch. Reassured, she withdrew her hand, rolled to her right side, and slid one arm under her pillow, the other around her growing middle. She wouldn’t risk having this baby out here, losing it, dying in a bed of blood the way her own mother had.
She wouldn’t.
Eighteen
Edie had barely begun the final novel in the fat Austen compendium, Persuasion—“A few years before, Anne Elliott had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early”—when the door to the storage shed opened. She didn’t know the time, but the slant of light through the narrow windows told her that this was earlier than usual, perhaps by as much as half an hour.
The one who entered—for the second time today—was Violet. Odd for her to tend to this task more than once in a day; odd, too, that she was early.
“Her,” Violet said to the person manning the door now. Randall. Edie hated Randall the most of the guards; though, actually, she didn’t really hate the others, even Joe, who struck her as decent people driven by desperation to actions even they weren’t entirely comfortable with. Not Randall, though. He was—she could tell—a bully and a blowhard. She hoped there never came a day when she was left alone with him.
Then Edie noticed where Violet was pointing. On reflex she touched her chest in the universal gesture of “Who, me?”
“Her?” Randall replied in disbelief. “Are you sure you don’t want to just watch the door while I go? I can haul it without any help. Or at least take the big guy.”
“I didn’t ask you to do it, and I didn’t ask for the big guy,” Violet said sharply. “You,” she said to Edie. “Grab the water cooler. You’re going to the well with me.”
“I don’t have any shoes,” Edie said.
“You won’t need them. It isn’t too far.”
Doubtful, but excited about the thought of fresh air and sky, Edie folded her book open and facedown on the floor, stood, and dusted off her bottom, which must be so grimy by now as to make such an effort pointless. Wes looked at her with wide eyes. Edie shrugged.
“Come on,” Violet said. “Grab a handle.”
She took one of the cooler handles and followed Violet out of the shed; it swung between them, banging awkwardly against the door as they went.
“We’re going this way,” Violet said, indicating upriver with her free hand.
For a few moments they plodded forward in silence. The ground was damp, and Edie’s feet were quickly soaked, but still, she didn’t mind. The air had a fresh, after-rain summer smell, and the lowering sun brindled the river. God, it felt so good to walk, to really extend her legs. She drew some odd looks from the few villagers they passed this far upstream, but no one asked Violet about her. No one said much to Violet at all. A nod, a “hidey,” a small wave. And Violet herself made no reply.
They reached not a well—or at least the stone-lined ring in the ground Edie had pictured—but a large galvanized hand pump with a poured concrete base. “Get the lid off and the lip under there,” Violet said, adding, as Edie complied, “They’re all dead.”
If Edie thought anything in the ten bewildered seconds she spent trying to process this statement, it was, vaguely, that Violet was as crazy as she was scary. Then she looked at Violet’s face—into that startlingly blue eye, the white so damp and fragile surrounded by such ravaged flesh—and the half-formed thought drifted away.
“What?” Edie managed.
“Your people. The four June sent back home, supposedly.” She started cranking the pump and a gusher of water rushed out. “They were shot by border guards trying to cross over. June knew it might happen. She sent them knowing it might.” Violet cleared her throat. “Hoping it might.”
Jesse. Tears spiked her eyes and she rubbed them fiercely away. You and I split up, and that’s the end, he had said. And he’d been right.
“But why?” Edie said.
Violet watched the cooler fill. “She’s in over her head. She didn’t know what to do with all of you, and she knew she couldn’t make you all cooperate.” It was hard to read Violet’s scarred face, its limited range of movement. “She wanted the problem to fix itself.”
How could that diminutive woman with the kindly aunt’s fluff of hair have done such a thing? That woman Edie had come so goddamn close to admiring?
Edie, not caring about ticks or about Violet or what anyone else might see, sat, put her head between her knees, and wept. She hadn’t cried throughout this whole ordeal. Not once. But now, she gave in. She cried for Jesse and the others, and she cried for herself. Because a person who would do what Violet was saying June had done was a person who would do pretty much anything.
“You need to pull it together. If you come back looking like you’ve been crying people are going to ask questions. Here.” Violet pressed something into Edie’s hand. Cool, damp. A rag she’d run under the well water. Edie held it against her eyes.
“Why did you tell me?” Edie asked, words muffled against the cloth.
“So you’ll listen when I ask for your help.”