Ned’s face in her dreams but gone when she opened her eyes. She lay in warm hay, it moved with her breath. She was glad there wasn’t any shit in the stall now but there had been some here before. Her face was away from them but she knew that of the three women behind her two were having her time of the month and one was past prime. She tried to sit up but her hands were bound behind her. She rolled over.
They wore black dresses and veils. She didn’t know who the two in back were but the one in front was Mrs. Tate, she could tell from her smell of her dead husband. She blinked and blew hay from her face and rolled over. They’d put her in a barn stall made secure with bars like a jail cell. Hay for sleeping. Slop jar in the corner. Nothing else.
Mrs. Tate held the Mississippi Gambler in her hand. What did you plan to do with this? Cut my throat?
Yall poisoned me, she said.
The ladies said nothing.
Mrs. Tate, Evavangeline said. Did I answer ye questions wrong and this is what I get?
I’m sorry, said the little woman. She handed the knife away. But you can’t say names here. We don’t have names here. You’ve been bitten by a struck dog. I saw the marks on your arm while you bathed. These other ladies have witnessed them as well. So we have no choice but to confine you. For your own safety. See if the ray bees have got you.
No, she said. She wriggled up against the wall and fell forward, her ankles bound as well. I ain’t got none, I swar. That dog was my own pet dog. It never had no ray bees.
If you don’t exhibit any symptoms, we’ll set you free and you can be a citizen of our town. And if you do have them, we’ll shoot you quickly and burn your remains.
But I got to go, Evavangeline said.
Why? Because of those children? If you tell us where they are, Mrs. Tate said, we’ll bring you some milk.
I had enough of yallses milk.
Well. If you change your mind, tell the guard here and she’ll let me know.
Mrs. Tate and another lady walked out of the barn. The guard moved a wooden bucket near the door and spread a dish towel over it and sat holding a pistol. She flung the knife which stuck in the wall. For near an hour Evavangeline tried to talk to her, but she may as well have been asking a salt block for a nickel for all the good it did.
Jest give me my knife, she begged.
The lady ignored her.
Eventually she gave up and fell asleep and dreamt again of Ned, this time wringing a pullet’s neck with his hands and tossing it to her to pluck and secret the feathers away in a bag for a surprise pillow she was stuffing. Settling against the kitchen wall and breaking wind and letting her pull off his boots and then dragging down his britches. She woke with hay stuck to her face and beyond the bars her guard knitting a boy’s sweater.
Ned had made whiskey money by whoring her out to passing men, signs along the road saying “Yung Gurl One Dolar” and with arrows directing customers to their house. Once a town lady big in her church stole a bunch of the signs and Ned tracked her to her house and killed her dogs and a peacock and threw them on the roof and said if she ever messed with his signs again he’d come back and burn her place to hell with her in it and all the younguns. She and her children had replaced the signs immediately, and after that everybody left them alone and a man or two a week was their average. More at Christmastime.
Once he was showing her how to make stew with the coons she’d brought in. Their hides were nailed to the logs outside to dry, hung over holes in the walls to stop the wind. It was not so cold that she needed to be bundled up, the fireplace glowing in one room and the stove in the other, and she moved around the dark smoky kitchen in a short dress made from a flour sack. He was at the woodstove dropping carrots and taters and onions into a bubbling pot that painted the air the color of a pretty picture. She walked barefoot on the dirt floor, then began to dance, humming, Ned’s large fingers dropping in celery and parsnip and she grazes the slope of his shoulders with her little biddy tits and he spins in his chair and grabs her onehanded by her ribcage and pulls her face into his beard.
Another time she got mad at him for bedding a coon-ass whore and tried to poison him with gun powder but he smelled it in the grits and put her out and said never come back and she’d lived outside in the yard for near a month with him never once looking at her as she shrank and shriveled from lack of food not willing to catch a coon ner wildcat ner skunk jest waiting for him to forgive her fore she died. He’d come out to feed the chickens and step over her where she was asleep in the dirt. If he was riding his mule he’d ride it right over her. If the mule hadn’t liked her so much it would of stepped on her a hundred times. But then Ned forgive her when the thaw come and he was out of money and more men was showing up needing they corks pulled. He took her back and burned her clothes and fed her and doctored her wounds and wormed her and cured her of the head lice and scrubbed her red in a tub and dried her on his shirt and then held her nekkid up in front of him lying down his arm purring.
He said, Evavangeline.
It was the only time she ever heard him say her name. Till then she hadn’t known she had one other than Gurl. Every morning after that when she opened her eyes she repeated it to herself, so she wouldn’t forget it. She remembered every hit, kiss, bite. She remembered the time he fed her watermelon heart. She would of drawn his face in the dirt with a stick but earth and wood couldn’t do him justice. She could of smelled him in wind blown past a dead skunk if only there were wind of him to blow. He told her he must of got the ray bees from one of them coons though he never saw no sign of em. He said he hadn’t told her yet cause he didn’t want to scare her. Wanted to be sure she didn’t have em too. But now it was time for him to do what he had to, he said, before he got all cross-eyed. He said he could feel his eyes crossing right now.
They were sitting beside one another by a fire in the yard. He’d been burning furniture out of the cabin all morning and not saying why. She leaned in to look at his eyes. There was something wrong with them, they were yellow and jumpy, toadfrogs drowning in shots of milk.
I can’t drank water, he told her, slobbering. Can’t stand the sight of it. He twitched. My thoat’s all swoll. Come I’s to hit ye last night? It’s cause ye offered me a sup of water. Member?
Yessir.
It’s the ray bees, he said. I run around all night shivering with em. I wanted to come in there with ye. I ain’t never seen no ray bee but I heard of em. I feel ever minute like there’s less of me and more of them. I feel like biting ye right now. He snapped his teeth at her.
She jumped back.
It ain’t that I want to, he said. But it’s part of me does. He snapped his teeth again and she slid a knife out of her shoe.
He looked hard at her and bared his teeth. I can’t see ye as clear as I used to could, neither. And I got no idea what my name is.
Ned—
Ye look like food, he said. I would eat you starting with ye face. I would start with ye eyes.
Ned—
He clicked his teeth.
Ned! She put her hands over her ears.
Gurl, he said. I was jest fooling with ye, he said. Come give ole Ned a love.
His beard twisted into a grin that frightened her but she hurled herself into his arms nevertheless and hugged his neck with her arms and his belly with her legs. She burrowed her face deep into his collar and ground her cooter against him. He was nibbling her shoulder, hard, groaning, sucking, it would leave a good hickey.
A second later he was eating into her neck and a cold shock went through her. She squirmed from his grasp and dragged her knife through his back and twisted the blade and catapulted herself away. He fell with his legs quivering and blood painting the sand and the knife buried halfway up its handle. She tumbled over the dirt and slid into the foliage and lay panting on her belly and bleeding from her neck and watching through her fingers as he lolled and howled and flailed his arms, jibbering like a shot animal, tearing his shirt off and rolling and growling and clawing at his chest. She was still watching when rain began to fall and she was watching still as thunder crashed overhead and the horizon flickered in the distance like the backdrop of creation and he shook in a fit and his tongue flagged out black and thick and his beard was foaming.