Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.

Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.

She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?

Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.

“Cassie, you still out here?”

The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon , she would take it personally that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.

Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues . Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by on in what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.

This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle’s, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn’t say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought, but couldn’t say (wasn’t sure what the words would be) that this wasn’t the way to go, Laura didn’t like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work at a minimum and preferred to be alone. Belle’s wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton’s Mythology , which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil In Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn’t so sure.

“What’s that in the yard? Do you see what I’m pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”

Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy’s shovel.

“Do you see the thing I’m talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom’s not going to want to walk out here and see it.”

The groundhog was lying belly up. He’d been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he’d—