Part of the cellar, a huge cold room with a domed ceiling, was lined with racks of bottles. Wine as old as Connie. The nuns seldom touched it, Connie told her, only when they could get a priest out there to say the mass they were starved for. And on some Christmases they made a moist cake soaked in a 1915 Veuve Clicquot instead of rum. All around in shadow lurked the shapes of trunks, wooden boxes, furniture, disused and broken. Nude women in polished marble; men in rough stone. At the farthest end was the door to Connie's room. Although it was not built for a maid, as Mavis said, its original purpose was unclear. Connie used it, liked it, for its darkness. Sunlight was not a menace to her there.
Seneca knocked, got no answer and pushed open the door. Connie was sitting in a wicker rocking chair snoring lightly. When Seneca entered she woke instantly.
"Who's carrying that light?"
"It's me-Seneca. And a friend."
"Set it down over there." She motioned to a chest of drawers behind her.
"This is Pallas. She came a couple days ago. She said she wants to meet you."
"Did she?" asked Connie.
Candle flame made it difficult to see, but Seneca recognized the Virgin Mary, the pair of shiny nun shoes, the rosary and, on the dresser, something taking root in a jar of water.
"Who hurt you, little one?" asked Connie.
Seneca sat down on the floor. She had scant hope that Pallas would say much if anything at all. But Connie was magic. She just stretched out her hand and Pallas went to her, sat on her lap, talkcrying at first, then just crying, while Connie said, "Drink a little of this," and "What pretty earrings," and "Poor little one, poor, poor little one. They hurt my poor little one."
It was wine-soaked and took an hour; it was backward and punctured and incomplete, but it came out-little one's story of who had hurt her.
She lost her shoes, she said, so at first nobody would stop for her. Then, she said, the Indian woman in a fedora. Or rather a truckful of Indians stopped for her at dawn as she limped barefoot in shorts by the side of the road. A man drove. Next to him the woman, with a child on her lap. Pallas couldn't tell if it was a boy child or a girl. Six young men sat in the back. It was the woman who made it possible to accept the offer of a lift. Under the brim of her hat the sleet-gray eyes were expressionless but her presence among the men civilized them-as did the child in her lap.
"Where you headed?" she asked.
That was when Pallas discovered that her vocal cords didn't work. That for soundmaking power she couldn't rival the solitary windmill creaking in the field behind her. So she pointed in the direction the truck was going.
"Get in back, then," said the woman.
Pallas climbed among the males-her age mostly-and sat as far away from them as she could, praying that the woman was their mother sister aunt-or any restraining influence. The Indian boys stared at her but said nothing at all. Arms on knees, they looked without a smile at her pink shorts, Day-Glo T-shirt.
After a while, they opened paper bags and began to eat. They offered her a thick baloney sandwich and one of the onions they ate like apples. Afraid a refusal would insult them, Pallas accepted, then found herself eating all of it like a dog, gulping, surprised by her hunger. The truck's sway and rock put her to sleep for a few minutes off and on; each time it happened she woke fighting out of a dream of black water seeping into her mouth, her nose. They passed places with scattered houses, Agways, a gas station, but did not stop until they reached a sizable town. By then it was late afternoon. The truck moved down an empty street, slowing in front of a Baptist church that had "Primitive" in its sign.
"You wait there," the woman said. "Somebody'll come and take care of you."
The boys helped her climb down, and the truck drove off. Pallas waited on the church steps. There were no houses that she could see and no one was in the street. As the sun dipped, the air turned chilly. Only the soles of her feet, raw and burning, distracted her from the cold overtaking her marrow. Finally she heard an engine and looked up to see the Indian woman again-but alone this time-driving the same truck.
"Get in," she said, and drove Pallas several blocks to a low building with a corrugated roof. "Go in there," she said. "It's a clinic. I don't know if you was bothered or what. You look like it to me. Like a bothered girl. But don't tell them in there. I don't know if it's true, but don't mention it, you hear? Better not to. Just say you was beat up or throwed out or something."
She smiled then, though her eyes were very grave. "Your hair's full of algae." She took off her hat and placed it on Pallas' head. "Go on," she said.
Pallas sat in the reception room along with patients as silent as she. Two elderly women with head scarves, a feverish baby in the arms of its sleeping mother. The receptionist looked at her with unwholesome curiosity but didn't say anything. It was threatening to get dark when two men came in, one with a partially severed hand. Pallas and the sleeping mother were yet to be attended to, but the man seeping blood into a towel took precedence. As the receptionist led him away, Pallas ran out of the entrance and around to the side of the building, where she lost every bit of the onion and baloney. Retching violently, she heard, before she saw, two women approach. Both wore shower caps and blue uniforms.
"Look at that," one said.
They came toward Pallas and stood, heads cocked, watching her heave.
"You on your way in or out?"
"Must be pregnant."
"You trying to see the nurse, honey?"
"She better hurry up."
"Let's take her to Rita."
"You take her, Billie. I got to go."
"She got a hat on but no shoes. Okay, go 'head. See you tomorrow." Pallas straightened up, clutching her stomach, breathing hard through her mouth.
"Listen to me. Clinic's closing less you an emergency. You sure you ain't pregnant?"
Pallas, trying to control another retch, shuddered. Billie turned to watch her friend's car leave the lot then looked down at the vomit. Without making a face she kicked dirt until it was out of sight.
"Where your pocketbook?" she asked, moving Pallas away from the buried sick. "Where you live? What they call you?" Pallas touched her throat and made a sound like a key trying to turn in the wrong lock. All she could do was shake her head. Then, like a child alone in a deserted playground, she drew her name in the dirt with her toe. Then slowly, imitating the girl's earlier erasure with the vomit, she kicked her name away, covering it completely with red dirt.
Billie took off her shower cap. She was much taller than Pallas and had to bend to see into the downcast eyes.