“Martin,” she’d whispered on their wedding night, fingers curled in his hair, lips tickling his left ear, “one day, we’ll have a little girl.”
And, sure enough, they did.
Seven years ago, after losing three babies still in the womb and then their son, Charles, who’d died at two months, Sara gave birth to Gertie. The girl was tiny, so small; Lucius said she wouldn’t live through the week.
He had passed his state boards and come back from Burlingtonto work with old Dr. Stewart, who soon retired, leaving Lucius the only M.D. in town. Lucius closed his leather medical bag and put his hand on Martin’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But Lucius was wrong: Gertie attached herself to Sara and sucked and sucked, growing stronger each day. Their miracle child. And Sara glowed with happiness, the tiny baby asleep on her chest, Sara looking over at Martin with an all-is-right-in-the-world-now smile. Martin felt the same way and knew that no adventure he might ever have gone on could have had a happier outcome than this.
Though she no longer sucked at her mother’s breast, Gertie had kept herself attached to Sara. They were inseparable, always intertwined, and they spelled secret words in each other’s palms with fingertips. Sometimes Martin was sure they didn’t need words to communicate at all—that they could read each other’s minds. They seemed to have whole wordless conversations with their eyes, laughing and nodding at each other across the supper table. At times, Martin felt a little spark of envy. He would try to be in on their secrets and little jokes, laughing in the wrong places and getting a poor-Papa look from Gertie. He understood, and eventually came to accept that they had a closeness, a bond, that he would never be a part of. The truth was, he believed he was the luckiest man on earth to have these two for a wife and daughter—it was like getting to live with fairies or mermaids, some breathtakingly beautiful creatures he was not meant to understand fully.
He did worry though, that the losses of their previous children had made Sara cling to Gertie in a way that seemed almost desperate. There were days when Sara would not let the girl leave for school, saying she was worried that Gertie’s nose was a little runny, or her eyes looked glassy.
In his darkest hours, Martin believed that, though she’d never say it, Sara blamed him for those dead babies that came before Gertie. Each miscarriage had nearly destroyed Sara—she spent weeks bedridden, weeping, eating only enough to keep a sparrow alive. And then Charles had been born healthy and strong, with a headful of dark curls and a face as wise as an old man. They’d found himbreathless and cold in his cradle one morning. Sara wrapped her arms around him, held on to him all day and into the next. When Martin tried to take the baby, Sara insisted he was not gone.
“He’s still breathing,” she said. “I can feel his little heart beating.”
Martin stepped away from her, frightened. “Please, Sara,” he said.
“Leave us,” she snarled, pulling the dead baby tighter, her eyes cold and frantic like those of a mad animal.
Finally, Lucius had to come and sedate her. Only when she was sleeping could they pry the child from her arms.
Martin believed the deaths were the fault of this place—the 120 acres that belonged to Sara by birthright. Other than her older sister, Constance, who’d married and moved out to Graniteville, she was the last remaining Harrison. He blamed the ledgy soil and barren fields, where almost nothing would grow; the water that tasted of sulfur. It was as if the land itself dared anything to stay alive.
Now, gun in hand, Martin moved east across the field as he pursued the fox, trudging along, his feet strapped into the bentwood-and-rawhide snowshoes. His breath came out in cloudy puffs. His feet were wet and cold, soaked through already. The fox tracks continued in a straight line, out into the orchard Sara’s grandfather had planted. The trees were unpruned; the few apples and pears they produced were woody, bug-filled, and spotted with blight.
Sara and Gertie would be out of bed now, wondering where he was. There would be a pot of coffee, biscuits in the oven. But he needed to do this, to kill the fox. He needed to show his wife and daughter that he could protect them—that if a creature threatened their livelihood in any way, he would destroy it. He’d kill the fox, skin it himself, and hand the pelt over to Sara, a surprise gift. She was clever, skilled with a hide and needle and thread—she could make a warm hat for little Gertie.
Martin leaned against a crooked apple tree to catch his breath. The snow swirled around him, limiting his visibility, making him feel strangely disoriented. Which way was home?
He heard something behind him—the soft whoosh of footsteps moving rapidly through the snow.
He turned. There was no one there. It was only the wind. He bit down on his lip, touched the warm ring in his pocket.
Ten yards ahead of him, a gnarled old apple tree moved. He squinted through the blowing snow and saw that it wasn’t a tree, but an old woman hunched over. She was dressed in animal skins, her hair tangled like a nest of serpents.
“Hello?” he called.
She turned, looked at Martin, and flashed him a smile, showing pointed brown teeth. Martin blinked, and it was a tree again, gently swaying under a heavy coat of snow.
The fox darted out from behind it, half a chicken still in its mouth. It froze, looking at Martin, its gold eyes flickering. He held his breath, shouldered the gun, and sighted the fox, which now looked up and watched him, its eyes like little rings of fire.
The fox looked at him; suddenly, for two whole seconds, it wasn’t the animal’s eyes that gazed dispassionately at him, but Sara’s.
Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry.
One day, we’ll have a little girl.
Martin blinked, trying to push this image from his mind—this was no trickster fox from a fairy tale. It was just his imagination, the result of a childhood spent absorbed in all those books.
The fox, now an ordinary fox with ordinary eyes once more, turned, dropped the chicken, and leapt away just as Martin squeezed the trigger.
“Damn it!” Martin shouted, realizing he’d missed.
He took off running in the fox’s direction and saw there was fresh blood on the ground. He’d hit the animal after all. Martin reached down; his fingertips brushed the snowy tracks and came away red. He raised them to his lips and tasted. It was sharp and salty and made his mouth water. Then, gun at the ready, he followed the trail through the orchard, up over the rocky ridge, past the Devil’s Hand, and down into the woods below, until he could only see a faint red every few paces. The beeches and maples, all stripped bare of leaves and shrouded in snow, looked unfamiliar. For an hour ormore, he moved on through thickets of dense growth, last year’s raspberry canes lashing out at him, home farther and farther away. The woods grew darker. He began to wonder if he had made the right choice, coming out here in the storm.
