Laura McHugh - The Weight of Blood

I peered in. A litter of possums, each about the size of my thumb, crawled over one another. Grown possums are ugly as sin, but the babies in the bag were unbearably cute, with their tiny pink noses and feet and delicate hairless tails.

“What’re you gonna do with them?” I asked, assuming she’d probably already diced their mother up in a stew. She ate most anything she shot, with the exception of feral cats, which she threw in the burn barrel without any hint of regret.

“They’re too little to cook,” she said matter-of-factly. “Hardly any meat on ’em. Figured Gabby might want ’em, seeing how she’s got all them animals.” She handed me the sack. “Think you could run ’em over there before dark?”

Gabby, Bess’s mom, took in every type of stray, man or beast, and couldn’t turn away abandoned babies—me being an example. She and Birdie, along with my uncle Crete, had taken turns keeping me until Dad emerged from his whiskey-soaked grief with the realization that Mom wasn’t coming home.

“Sure,” I said.

“When you get back, you’re welcome to come for supper. Spare room’s always ready if you care to stay.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Just depends when I get back, I guess.” I had no intention of sleeping at Birdie’s if I didn’t have to. I used to stay with her all the time when my dad was away on construction jobs, and when he finally agreed to let me stay home alone, it was only so long as Birdie checked in on me. He knew she kept a close watch, shuffling the half-mile to our house periodically to make sure I wasn’t burning the place down or starving to death or whatever else he thought would happen without her supervision.

“Don’t dawdle, now,” she said.

We nodded goodbye and I carried the bag through the backyard, pausing to pluck some pennyroyal and rub it on my arms and legs to ward off ticks. A deer path led from the creek up toward the river, where Bess and Gabby lived in a double-wide behind Bell Tavern. The woods I walked through belonged to my dad and uncle. Each had his own chunk, though it was hard to tell where the property split. Grandpa Dane had left the general store to Crete, who was the firstborn and arguably the better businessman. Dad wasn’t bitter about it; he preferred construction work anyhow. And he hadn’t come away empty-handed. He got the house and took over the family vocation of gravedigging, though it was no longer the profitable business it had been in Grandpa’s day. It had diminished to a nearly forgotten craft, like making bentwood chairs or apple dolls, and didn’t take much time away from Dad’s real job.

Private burial was legal as long as it was done on private property, outside the city limits. Most of Dad’s business came from old folks who lacked the funds for a “city” burial, which was what they called anything involving a funeral parlor. There were others, too: hippies from the commune on Black Fork who’d rather rot in the woods than be embalmed; a preacher from the snake-handling church who hadn’t been worthy enough for God to save from the venom. There were shady circumstances, too, but Dad was known, as Danes have been known for generations, for looking the other way. Sometimes when he was drinking, he’d tell me stories I was not to repeat, of people burned up in meth lab explosions, shot in drug deals, beaten to death by jealous lovers. When he sobered up, he would apologize for scaring me and make me swear he hadn’t told me any names.

The trees thinned and I could hear the river where it raked over the shallows. “Lucy-lou,” Gabby hollered as I came into view. She was sitting in a lawn chair on the wobbly front deck, with her bare feet propped up on a cooler, her frizzy blond hair bushing around her head like a lion’s mane. She wore a terry-cloth swimsuit cover-up minus the swimsuit. “When you gonna listen and call me for a ride? You know I don’t like you walking those woods alone.”

“Sorry,” I said. Bess and I had roamed freely before Cheri’s murder, and Gabby had always encouraged it. Please, she’d say. Go disappear for a while . I kept hoping her newfound concern would wear off.

A joint smoldered between Gabby’s thumb and forefinger. “Goddamn,” she said as I walked up the steps. “You look more like your mama every time I see you. Got your hair halfway to your ass just like her. And you’re finally getting yourself some titties, praise Jesus. I was starting to worry.”

I’d always been told I looked like my mother, but over the past year, as my hair grew out and I got taller and slightly less awkward, Gabby had compared me to her constantly. It made me happy at first, to know how much I resembled my mom, but lately Gabby seemed troubled by it. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, her face all sorry and sad.

“I brought you something,” I said. She took a long drag on the joint, burning it up to her fingertips, and stubbed the roach out on her armrest. I opened the sack for her to see.

“Oh, Lordy!” she said, scooping up one of the possums and cupping it in her palm. “Where’d you get these adorable critters?”

“Birdie,” I said.

“I’m surprised she didn’t eat ’em.” Gabby stroked the possum’s silky little tail, and it curled around her finger.

The screen door squeaked open and Bess joined us on the deck, pulling her home-bleached hair away from her neck and fanning herself. “More strays?” The trailer was already home to an unknown number of cats and a rabbit with a mangled leg.

“Just look, Bessie,” Gabby said, holding up her finger. The possum hung upside down by its tail.

“Birdie shot their mom,” I said.

“Perfect.” Bess rolled her eyes at Gabby. “We know how you love the motherless.”

Gabby ignored her. “Lucy, I’ve got a nursing mama cat out in the woodpile. I’ll see if she’ll take ’em on. We’ll start with one, ’case she eats it. That happens, we bottle-feed.”

“You think a cat’ll nurse a possum?” Bess said, examining the roach to see if there was anything worth salvaging. “You’re nuts. That’s a crime against nature.”

“I’ve seen stranger things,” Gabby said.

“C’mon, Luce.” Bess slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. “Let’s go to Bell’s. I’m out of cigarettes.”

“Forget it,” Gabby said. “Gonna get dark here right quick. I don’t wanna be picking pieces of you out of the river.”

“We could just as easily get chopped up in daylight.” Bess ran a finger under the edge of her shorts and tugged them down.

“I said no.” Gabby took the baby possums out of the bag one by one and draped them on her chest, where they clung to the terry cloth with tiny paws.

“You weren’t so worried about our safety when you used to lock us in the station wagon and whore yourself out at the Red Fox,” Bess said.

“If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t have locked the doors.” They glared at each other until Gabby stalked off, cradling the possums.

“Why do you have to bring up stuff like that?” I asked.

“It just pisses me off,” Bess said. “You know how she had that come-to-Jesus moment after the whole Cheri thing, went back to A.A., started asking where I’m going all the time.” She twisted her hair into a bun and then shook it loose. “It’s annoying. She thinks she’s mother of the year now. I just like to remind her.”

“She’s still smoking,” I said. “How’s that work with A.A.?”

Bess laughed. “Pot’s not a drug , it’s her medicine —she says it’s for her anxiety. Like Xanax or something. It’s the only thing that keeps her sane. I’m actually looking forward to working at Wash-n-Tan so I don’t have to spend all summer stuck in the trailer with her.”