Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

We don our Blaze Orange vest and check our ammo, fingering the bright rows of silver bullets, pretty and promising as the moon. If we bring down a werewolf, we get to dig the bullets out and string them on a necklace like bloody, lumpy beads. Some of the older girls have necklaces so long they drape them round two, three times, like strands of pearls.

When we set up our stands, we feel a little fear, an icicle thrill at the thought of teeth and claws. We know that if we slip up, we could be bitten, we could be killed. We know that we could fail. It is important; it is vital to our town that we succeed. We have spent the year learning how to use our rifles, diligently attending target practice after school, at shooting ranges and on decoys in the fields, when the weather allows.

Some of us feel sorry for the werewolves. Some of us do not want to kill, the soft thunk of bullet in flesh a thing apart from the hard clean splintering of wood and paint. Our fathers remind us of what we already know: the werewolves are a pestilence, a plague upon our forests, and killing them makes a good sport and a kind deed. There are too many werewolves, our fathers tell us; if we do not cull the herd they will starve to death come winter. They will spread disease and decay.

This is what fathers and daughters have always done in our towns, they say. This is a good and righteous way to live. And so we nod, and learn the proper way to clean our rifles, to use a compass, to scout a location, to field-dress a dead werewolf. And so we come, every year in our time, to the hunt.

We crouch beside our fathers in the brush. We hold our breath; we watch a family of werewolves rip the meat from a deer carcass in the clearing. We are silent and still. We are eager to prove that we are good daughters.

One large wolf, a male, leaves the pack and ambles toward us. We shiver in the cold and the tight grip of fear; a small girl was eaten only last year, her father helpless to act as she was dragged away by a furious and wounded wolf. We blink, blink, and here the wolf stops, sniffing, and here is an unobstructed broadside shot, and here are our fathers mouthing, Shoot, shoot! and here is our shot flying true and flaying skin and muscle just below the shoulder. Here is the unearthly howl, and our blood freezes to our bones to hear it. Here is the werewolf, here is the glassy-eyed stare, here is the twitch and the moan and here is the carcass on the ground and our fathers’ hands on our shoulders, strong and proud. Here is our first kill.

With the help of our fathers, we dress the werewolf and drag it to our trucks. Later, we will dig the bullets out and string them, silver over our throats. Later, we will eat the hearts of the men they slowly become; we will share this meat with our fathers and we will warm our shame at that howl, our sadness at that last dissolve of paw to hand. Our fathers will hold their palms up and smile.

We Benders got headaches in our blood, the way some people got brains or beauty. Me and Katie are both sore afflicted, not only with the headaches but also with dizziness and fainting spells, too. And sometimes we get to feeling sick in the stomach, and sometimes we even get bright, blurred colors, right at the edge of our seeing, like watching a rainbow through window glass.

Katie makes use of hers because she’s the actress of the family. That’s what Pa says. She calls herself Professor Miss Katie and whenever we move to a new town, we put out that she is a soothsayer. And when one of her fits comes upon her, she makes sure to faint right near a crowd of folks and come up talking about some spirit what was trying to contact a loved one nearby. Everybody knows somebody dead.

That’s how we drum up business. That and also Pa and Ma put out some tables and chairs on one side of our cabin, and strung up a bedsheet so customers can have some privacy, and there’s a cot if they want to sleep as well as dine. And Professor Miss Katie is also Doctor Miss Katie and if folks want a healer, she’s good for that, too. Katie Bender is full of the talents that never got born in other people, that’s what Pa says. And Ma frowns and says nothing at all, but that’s just Ma for you.

How it works is this: One of the townsfolk don’t trust doctors, and maybe they got a good reason not to, so they come and ask for Doctor Miss Katie instead. They know that title don’t mean Doctor like schooling, but Doctor like healing, helping folks get well. Katie has a lot of different charms and spells she uses. Her favorite is something she calls the Quick Healer — it’s supposed to speed up the getting-better part of being sick. She has a little cherry wood cabinet that Pa made before he got hurt, real pretty with carvings of fruits and nuts spilling from horns of plenty. She’s got it filled with dried herbs, and she chooses different ingredients from different drawers depending on what ails you. She grinds them together with a mortar and pestle, and mixes that with soap and ashes to make a paste. Sometimes she sort of sings while she mixes, her yellow hair hanging down in sheets over her face, her arms twitching with the effort of all that grinding and stirring. She sing-hums charms against death, against poison and rot, against the damp and cold and the evil that lurks outside the door. I don’t much like the song and I don’t like watching her sing it, like a backwoods witch. It makes my skin itch and my head hurt, but I always watch her anyway. It hurts not to watch her, that’s how bright she is, like light off glass. She mixes all kinds of things: waybread, cockspur, chamomile, nettle. Fennel and crab apples and lamb’s cress and dandelion. Milk and honey and burdock, to make the crops grow and the livestock strong.

I think she makes most of it up. I used to think Katie really was some kind of healer, until one day I watched her humming and muttering and mixing, her hair down and her back to the anxious little fellow waiting for his ma’s medicine. And just for a second the front of her face poked through the hair and she winked at me, bold as brass. How it works is this: Katie Bender is a good liar and a very good actress and how it works, also, is this: People will believe just about anything that comes out of a pretty girl’s mouth.

I’m not much for acting, and not much good at lying, so Pa says it’s best to pretend I am dumb and that is just what I do. When we get to a town, we put it out how Katie’s a seer and we put it out that I’m not right in the head. It helps because people say all kinds of things around an idiot that they wouldn’t say around anyone else. Idiots must have an awful lot of good secrets. I’m a good listener and I remember most things people say; I tuck them away in the drawers in my head and label them careful so later I can go back and pull out the things I need to know. Like who has just came into a large inheritance, or who has money socked away under the mattress, or who has lost a loved one and would pay good gold to speak to them again. So I come in useful, too, even though I can’t act for beans and I can’t do the German accent, neither.

The accent was Pa’s idea. He said nobody in these little frontier towns would know Germany from Georgia so it was fine if it didn’t come off perfect. It’s easier to explain why we just came here so sudden, with a decent bit of money, and no people to speak of. Katie taught us all the way to speak, funny and short with sounds like you’re choking on a bite of beef. Pa and Ma are pretty good, and Katie sounds positively foreign. She is forever making us proud, plus she’s real pretty too, with lots of yellow hair and teeth what look like rich folks’ teeth, white and straight and shiny. Half my teeth have fell out already, and Pa has only two teeth left in his whole head; he uses them to open cans and crack nuts. Which he does pretty often. He likes to show off them teeth, as Ma says, like a sideshow freak. Ma doesn’t believe in being prideful. Katie’s a lot more like Pa. Pa says whatever you do, you should be the best at it. And I think we are.