Laura McHugh - The Weight of Blood

I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. “What did you do to her?”

I felt the boom before I heard it, a reverberation in my chest, and then Uncle Crete fell to the floor, his face in the dirt. I thought at first he’d been struck by flying debris, but then Birdie dropped down into the cellar, her hair plastered to her head so I could see the pink scalp beneath. She set down her gun and wrestled Crete’s legs out of the way so she could bar the timber door. I didn’t move. My eyes struggled to adjust to sudden blindness. In the faintly lit circle beneath the ventilation pipe, Crete’s blood crept across the floor. There was a shift in pressure, a horrible sucking at the pipe, and my ears popped. The door groaned but held. And then Birdie’s arms were around me, cradling me so I couldn’t tell whether her body was shaking or mine, and we stayed there while the roar outside died away and for some time after that.

We stepped gingerly around Crete’s body and out into the gray evening light. “Are you all right?” Birdie asked finally. “I heard the warning on the radio, and I know you said you were fine, but I promised to look after you… and then I saw him there with the rifle…”

“He wasn’t going to shoot me,” I said. “It was my gun. He just took it away to keep me from doing something stupid.”

“We don’t know what he would’ve done,” Birdie said sharply.

When the phones came back up, Birdie called Dad. He was already on his way, having heard about the tornado. Birdie took him out on the porch when he arrived, and I couldn’t hear what she said to him. She had her hand on his arm and kept him facing away from the window so I couldn’t see his face. He pulled away from her at one point, and his shoulders slumped, but she kept talking, and a minute later, she was following him to the root cellar. Birdie came in through the back door and took me by the hand. She was trembling. “I tried to explain…” she said, trailing off. “He needs time. Let’s go to my place for a bit.” We rode in silence, observing the storm debris—shredded leaves, snapped branches, a lawn chair in the ditch—without comment.

Birdie plied me with tea and sugar cookies that I didn’t want but ate anyway, for the sake of doing something normal, familiar. Bite, chew, swallow. I could do that much. She didn’t eat anything, just sat in her chair watching me from the corner of her eye, knitting needles working an endless skein of yarn.

When night fell, I knew Dad was taking care of Crete. Wrapping his body in a tarp and dragging it from the cellar. Cleaning up the evidence. Mourning the loss of his brother, who, despite everything he was suspected of, everything he’d done, was still Dad’s blood, the last of his family. Except for me. I was and would always be a Dane, with all the good and bad that entailed, and like my forebears, I would keep the secrets entrusted to me until they slipped from my naked bones. But Birdie had taught me that I needn’t be bound by the unspoken laws of kin; that I could have a family based not on bloodline but on love. She had kept her promise to my mother to look after me. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it sooner, that Birdie loved me as she loved her own children—enough to take a life to save mine.

Frogs started up their courting songs. After a while Birdie took out her worn Bible and read aloud in a quiet, soothing voice until at last sleep beckoned . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

We took a somber tour of the storm damage the next day. The tornado had skipped through Henbane in typical fickle fashion, demolishing some buildings and leaving others untouched. A mangled pickup balanced precariously on the roof of the Great Southern Bank. One of the ancient gum trees on the courthouse lawn had toppled, smashing into the Donut Hole across the street. Sections of the blacktop road leading to the river had been scoured down to bare earth, and a handful of homes had been reduced to a confetti of insulation, splinters, and glass. The storm took pieces of Henbane with it, snatching up photographs and receipts and pages of books with greedy fingers and dropping them out of the sky as far away as Howell County.

Dane’s general store was intact minus a few shingles and the patio awning, but the landscape around the building had been swept clean—the hand-lettered signs advertising firewood and night crawlers, the planters overflowing with petunias, the trash can and ashtray and wooden benches, the old wagon where Crete had stacked melons and pumpkins for sale. Even the morning glories that climbed the walls and gutters had been stripped away. Devoid of all its familiar adornments, Dane’s appeared alien and unwelcoming. Cheri’s tree, along with countless others, had been uprooted and tossed in the river.

Several people had been wounded by flying debris. Arleigh Snell had been rescued from her crushed trailer after hours spent pinned under the rubble, and one person remained unaccounted for. Whispers spread through town that Crete Dane was missing. A storage shed behind his house had been ripped apart, the contents lost to the wind, and it was thought that he might have been borne away in the funnel cloud. The sheriff expressed hope that Crete’s remains would be recovered, but with thousands of acres of forest on all sides, it wasn’t feasible to launch a search.

An anonymous tip led to a raid on Caney Mountain, but no trace of Emory was found. While it was possible, authorities acknowledged, that a significant trafficking ring had operated in Ozark County, they were unable to locate the victims. They couldn’t even prove the existence of the suspect; his identity had never been captured on paper. I wanted Holly to come forward, but I couldn’t force her. Much of the experience was blurry for her, and she wasn’t ready to bring it into focus. I filled my journal with alternate endings, things I could have done to save her without letting Emory go. I felt the weight of the other girls I’d endangered with his escape. I hadn’t seen Jamie since he’d driven off into the storm, but Sarah told me he’d stayed by Holly’s side that whole night, watching over her, keeping her safe. He had stayed until I finally reached Ray and asked him what to do with her.

Ray had no trouble getting appointed as Holly’s temporary guardian, something her mother did not emerge to protest. He and his wife had been looking for a child to dote on for a very long time, and if they had their way, they’d adopt her. I still thought of Holly with her 4-H rabbits, waiting on the curb for someone to take her home, and I was glad she now had a family she could rely on. I didn’t know what it would take to heal her after all she had been through, but I believed the Walkers would do everything possible to mend her wounds.

In the weeks after Lucy Dane’s visit to Riverview, Ransome fretted over the question she hadn’t asked: She had wondered all these years if Lucy still had her baby quilt and whether the girl knew Ransome had sewn it. But she’d been so taken aback when she laid eyes on Lila’s daughter that the question had dried up in her mouth. She knew it was Lucy who stood before her, but for a second she wondered if it was Lila’s ghost, come to take her to the other side.

When Lila left the garage—when Carl carried her away—she didn’t take anything with her. Ransome thought for sure Carl would come by to fetch her belongings, but he never did, and she wasn’t about to drive Lila’s suitcase over to the house. It was best if she didn’t see Lila or talk to her. After a while Crete told Ransome to clean out the garage. She was bagging everything up for the burn barrel when she pulled a ratty pink T-shirt out of the chest of drawers. It had belonged to the first girl. She pressed her face to it, trying to recall the girl’s smell, but it was long gone, nothing left except the musty stink of old wood. She stuffed the shirt in the trash bag along with Lila’s clothes and hauled it all up the hill to her house.