She did it again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for, but now I didn’t see it. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head, and I could not see her, though I could see her panting breath.
I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech — I had played it out many times: “I need you,” she would say. “For my parents. They’re stuck in here and I must let them out. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course I didn’t. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn’t know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, “So very soon now!” But it was not so soon, and I waited.
She didn’t say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn’t smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so I could feel the cold against my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak a word.
“Goodbye,” she said, and slipped it in with as much gentleness as I suppose could possibly have been managed. I heard my brother’s voice ring in my head. He, too, spoke one word: “Now!” For just a moment, when I felt it enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy, but not for long. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Travis’s scream, louder than my father’s scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, though I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the seawall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. As I clambered up the ravine, I could hear her behind me. At the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught up with me, stabbing my dangling calf, so I fell. I kicked at her when she came again, getting her knee, but she didn’t cry out. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I caught her in the jaw and knocked her down, and I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to take the time to close the window. I rushed through my door and down the stairs into my parents’ bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.
“I want to live!” I told them, though my heart broke as I said it, because as my mother turned on her light, Colm’s image appeared in the floor-length mirror that stood on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody, like me, wounded, I knew, by my cowardice and betrayal. I saw him looking at me while my parents jumped out of bed and rushed to me, with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of their bloody child. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because I was bleeding from painful wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last sacrifice a human life to her soul-eating dagger, which somehow I knew would happen, as it did. I didn’t cry like that because I felt guilty over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though I did feel guilty. And I wasn’t crying at my impending betrayal of Molly Pitcher, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.
THE VISION OF PETER DAMIEN
Peter had never been sick a day in his life. When all seven of his brothers lay in bed with the chicken pox (lined up by height and by severity of the rash, Tercin, shortest and most mildly afflicted, on one end and Thomas, tallest and oldest and most ill, on the other), Peter waited on them with their sisters, untouched even though Tercin spit on him every time he came near enough to hit. When Amy brought home the pearly botch and Kathryn and Louise and Anne got the oak gall on their knees, he was unaffected, and even when the whole family got the yellow flux he was the only one of them not jaundiced in his eyes and skin, though he’d snuck a second helping of Mr. Hollin’s tainted bluefish. Lonely in his perfect health, Peter had rubbed his skin with hickory root, but his mother discovered the ruse. She beat him with the stick called Truth and exiled him to the barn for a week, because the only thing worse than telling a lie was to become one.
So when he woke that Lammas Eve, shivering despite the August heat and yet soaked with sweat, he did not understand what was happening to him. He wondered if Tercin had thrown a bucket of springwater on him, but his only younger brother was sound asleep on the other side of their room, uttering the sobbing sighs he always made when he dreamed, and anyway it would be more like Tercin to soak him with horse piss. He lay quite still for a few minutes, watching the moon rise in his window. The room he shared with his brother had been the last to be glassed, and the window was only fifteen days old. He knew it was a waning gibbous moon, though you couldn’t tell it by its shape — the ripples in the glass twisted it into a shape as soft and irregular as a round of the soft cheese Mrs. Clark made from her goats’ milk. The bubbles in the glass caught the light in such a way that they startled him — it was his own birthday glass and he had cleaned and admired it incessantly for the past two weeks, and yet now it was more beautiful than ever, and he felt all of a sudden a tremendous sympathy with those bubbles. He felt suspended in the thick transparent air, floaty and full of moonlight. So this is a fever, he said to himself, realizing the feeling his brothers and sisters had described, and he noticed a little ache in his bones that faded as quickly as it came. He turned over in his dampening bed and fell back asleep.
“I was sick last night,” he told his mother at breakfast the next day, careful to keep even the smallest measure of pride from his voice. Though he had grown to almost twice her size she wouldn’t hesitate to use the stick called Humility (and it was the second-largest of the seven that stood in a barrel on the back porch) on him if she thought his better parts would profit by it.
“A dream of sickness?”
“No, I had a fever and an aching in my bones. Now it’s gone.”
“A strange dream,” she said. “Fevers don’t come and go so quick. Lucky for us dreams of sickness never come true in the summer.” Still, she looked over her family at the table, everyone, even picky Tercin, eating heartily of the oatmeal and honey and eggs, and not a runny nose or a dull eye among them, and she made a sign that Peter recognized as a ward against bad fortune. She scraped the edge of her finger down her nose. To anyone who didn’t know her well it would have looked like she was merely scratching.