“Witch!” the unfamiliar kid shouted, stepping forward, into the light of dawn. “I call thee out, in the name of Jesus Christ, to face your punishment and the justice of the church.”
I thought a minute, not seeing any other way except to shoot him. My guts curdled. “I’m not a witch,” I shouted back, trying to buy some time, trying to figure out what to do, how to save these children and still keep me alive. “I’m a baptized Christian just like you, only I don’t try ’n kill people who are different from me.”
“You’re a woman. You gotta do what you’re told,” he said.
I took a breath to reply when I felt the change up through the floor. I might have felt it sooner if I’d still been barefoot, or had my boots in the dirt, but two factors were detrimental to my knowing what was happening until it was close: wearing boots in the house, and my attention on a more obvious threat.
A truck had pulled up the hill and turned into my drive, the headlights illuminating the boys with their guns. The boys froze like deer in the headlights and the sun peeked over the horizon, tinting them in the bright red and gold of morning. I heard a voice, a bull horn or loudspeaker from the truck. “You children get back to your own homes!”
I closed my eyes in relief so strong it sent acid up my throat. It was Thad Rankin, and he sounded mad as a hornet. “Git!” he shouted.
The boys turned as one and raced back into the trees, the outsider boy in the lead. He might have shouted to the others. I couldn’t hear, but I felt the remaining boys race toward him, back the way they came. I sprinted to the front, staring through the windows. I felt more than saw Thaddeus get out of his truck and slam the door, muttering under his breath about hooligans. And I laughed, the sound a panicked wheeze.
I dropped to the sofa, following the stranger boy and his comrades back to the Stubbins farmland. I felt the land rise up, as if aware, as if tracking them as a threat, as if it knew who they were and where they went. As if the woods had . . . learned something about the threat they posed to me. Something dark and wild raced through the ground, following the boys. It was more cohesive now than it had been. More complete, less divided, and that was unexpected. I wrenched my thoughts away from the land and the sick feeling that the dark thing brought me.
I went to the door, and opened it to my rescuer.
Thad Rankin asked, “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head and realized I was trembling. A sob burst out, as unfamiliar as the dark thing in my woods. I was crying. Again. I wrapped my arms around myself and shuddered, backing away to let Mr. Thad and Deus into my living room. “I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “I didn’t know what . . .” I trembled so violently my teeth rattled. “They were children. Just babies.” I sobbed again, the sound harsh. I hadn’t cried in front of people since Leah died. My knees hit the sofa, and I stopped moving. “Copying their daddies and the hateful men at the church. I couldn’t even defend myself. They were just children,” I said fiercely.
Mr. Rankin pointed at the sofa and I fell onto it, wiping my face.
“I heard a shot. Did they shoot at you?” he asked.
“No. I fired a warning shot over their heads.”
“What did they want?” he asked. His eyes were tight and dark with worry.
“They came looking for a churchman who went missing while hunting. They accused me of having him prisoner in my house.” Rankin’s eyebrows went up in surprise. I shrugged, feeling tired. “They said they were here to set him free and take me back, by force.”
Rankin said, “We’ll check the house. Do you want me to call the sheriff when I get into cell range?”
“No. I won’t send a bunch of children to juvenile detention for nothing. I put on coffee,” I said. “Help yourself.”
I went to the bath and splashed water on my face, which was white and bloodless, my eyes too big. I freshened up and felt a sight better when I came back out, and better still when I realized that Thaddeus and his son were checking the house and the woods out back.
When they came back in, I had a loaf of homemade sliced bread, plates, spoons, three cups of coffee, real cream and sugar, and a jar of peach-hot open on the table. My peach-hot (peach preserves made with hot peppers) was the best in the county. After exchanging a glance I couldn’t interpret, the two sat at my kitchen table and made up their coffee to suit them, Deus taking his with sugar and his daddy taking his black. We sat there, silent, and I realized that it was the first time they had ever sat at my table. Which was a shame.
“Thank you for being here,” I said, the coffee sitting uneasily on my stomach. I tore a slice of bread and chewed, hoping to settle it, which led to Deus taking a slice and smearing preserves on it. He was a young man, and young men were always hungry.
“Why did you leave the cult?” Thaddeus asked.
I understood his curiosity on all the levels—curiosity about the cult, curiosity about why someone would shoot up my house. I chewed, and drank my coffee, and said, “I stopped attending God’s Cloud for several reasons,” I said. “One, when I inherited this property I fell into ‘sin and disfavor.’” I made the words a quote with my fingers, and both men showed surprise. “This property, by church law, should have gone to the church upon John’s death, since he had no sons. But after Leah died, John and I were married by a judge, legally, under the laws of the state of Tennessee, instead of according to church law. And his will had been filed properly. I was his widow, and I inherited.
“The church objected, but they lost in court. They had to pay the legal and court expenses too.” I knew that the men heard my satisfaction. I’d been practically blissful when the judge had ruled that the church had to pay my lawyer and all costs.
“Reason two,” I said, “a proper churchwoman would have taken her deed to the land and gone right to the church and married according to her next male relative’s wishes or according to the will of the leader of the church.”
“What?” Deus said. “That’s not right.”
I smiled behind my cup at the statement, but it faded when his father said, “There’s lot a things wrong in this world, son. It’s important to remember that others have troubles we don’t always see.” He was right. My problems were small potatoes compared to the problems of others.
Deus slurped nosily. “Mama’d a killed them boys.”
Thaddeus laughed. “Your mama is a pistol, boy, but she wouldn’t have killed some foolish children.”
“Okay. She’d a made ’em wish they was dead.”
Thad laughed softly. “You got that right.” The men bumped fists. The coffee was strong and bitter, but they drank it anyway. “You were saying,” Mr. Thad said.
“After John died, I declined to do anything they thought I should. Mostly I declined to marry one of them,” I said, at last, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
“John and I attended services at the church on the occasional Sunday morning, in order to keep the peace, but when he got sick, and then passed, I stopped going altogether, even though that meant I had to sneak around to see my own sisters and Mama.”
“And that’s why schoolchildren came to shoot up your house?”
“Land and property, patriarchy and hierarchy, are all important to them. Women aren’t. I’m never going back to the God’s Cloud and their punishment.”
Deus looked puzzled. “Punishment?”
“I’ll explain later,” his father said, his tone grudging and sad. It seemed that Mr. Rankin knew something about the church and how things worked after all, likely from the time the compound was raided by the sheriff, social services, and the child welfare people. The media had released all sorts of information to the public then, including the existence of the punishment house. Which, now that I thought of it, was a good reason for Jackie to have turned it into a guest cottage.
“Thank you for the coffee, ma’am,” Mr. Thad said, standing. “Come on, son. We got work to do.” He left through the front door for the driveway, his son trailing.
I could hear them chatting as they unloaded equipment from the truck, voices low. I figured that Thaddeus was explaining church things to his son. I closed my eyes and thought about my land. They were the only two people on it. The boys were back on Stubbins’ property, nearing the farmhouse. Some things I shouldn’t be able to know this far away, this far from my property’s boundary.
On the Vaughn farm, the new nonhumans were back, but deep in the woods, tramping on the far side of the hillock. I was curious what they were doing, but not inquisitive enough to go ask. I was tired and sleepy and sad, but with all the workers here, I was safe.
My forest was changing fast, yet it hadn’t killed the boys, not even the boys who had bled all over it. I had the feeling that the woods could have stolen the life force even without my intervention, but . . . I hadn’t wanted to kill children, so the woods hadn’t killed.
I needed to find out the limitations and boundaries of my woods’ power, but I had no idea how to go about that, short of some deadly experimentation.
* * *
While keeping a close mental eye on the woods, I put a meal together and cleaned house and started some oregano tinctures and weeded the garden again and generally stayed out of the way as a variety of men and one woman came and went, repairing my house. Most of the work was done before supper, and when the trucks drove off and the dust had settled, I stepped out onto the front porch and made a megaphone of my hands. “I know you’re out there!” I shouted. “Come on in.”
I turned my back and went inside, watching through the front window as the snoops I had been feeling on the Vaughn farm slowly worked through the trees, onto the property, across the lawn, and up to my house. I had determined that there were three nonhumans and one human. The three nonhumans moved differently from the churchmen. They moved differently from the Rankins, differently from people at the market or at the produce stand, differently from the people I saw on the television shows I checked out of the library. They glided, slid, slinked their way to the house, all but the human, who tramped as if tired. The small group came slowly, out in the open, across the grassy lawn that would soon need to be cut, whether it wanted to or not. They looked watchful, scanning the house for attack, the woods for attack, and everywhere for danger. They gathered at my front steps in a thin semicircle, and there they waited. One of them had my mouser cats on his shoulders, much like Paka had carried them, and he was taller than the others, with long blondish hair and a whip-lean form.
Once I was satisfied that they had all come, I walked out of my front door, without a shotgun, the way I’d met Mr. Thad—in peace. “You’re Rick LaFleur’s people,” I said. “You’uns broke the deer stand into pieces and sent it flying.”
“Yes, ma’am, we are,” the blond male said in an accent. Texan, maybe, but then I knew next to nothing about accents. “Newly graduated from Spook School, on temporary assignment here in Knoxville for some advanced training, a little liaison work with the FBI, and a little light night work here in your hills.” His eyes roamed my bruises and his expression darkened. “I’m just sorry we weren’t here when the coward hit you, ma’am.”