“I guess.” Maybe it’s even true; maybe everybody has to survive the best they can. Maybe her sisters couldn’t afford to haul a wild ten-year-old girl along with them when they ran. “But later. You could’ve come back later.” Or written a letter, at least. Even a single smudged address would’ve been a map or a key to Juniper, a way out.
Agnes shrugs one shoulder. “Only if I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked in the cellar. Daddy told me he’d skin me himself if he ever saw me again, and I guess I believed him.”
“He—what?”
Agnes looks up again, but now there’s a faint crease between her brows. “When he sent me away. He told me he was through with me, that he did his best but God cursed him with wayward daughters, and he washed his hands of us.”
Juniper doesn’t hear anything but the beginning:He sent me away. Her daddysentAgnes away.
What if her sisters hadn’t cut and run? What if they loved her after all? It’s too huge a thing to think, too dangerous to want. Juniper feels her own pulse rabbiting in her ears, her fingers trembling on the red-cedar staff.
“Why—” She stops, swallows hard. “Why did he send you away?”
The frown between Agnes’s brows goes a little deeper. “You don’t remember?”
Juniper limps to the bed and settles beside her sister. “I remember I was running the mountain that day.” The slant of sun through leaves, the bite of briars, the whip of sassafras and beech leaves against her cheeks. Some days it would take her like that, an animal need to run and keep running, and she would dive through the woods at a pace that would have killed a person who didn’t know every stone and gully of that mountain.
“I was running and then I felt . . .” A tugging in her chest, an invisible need that made her turn around and run even faster. “Well. I remember walking into the old tobacco barn, all dark and hot. You and Bella were there, and so was Daddy . . .” Juniper feels something vast slide beneath the surface of her memory like a whale beneath a ship. She looks away from it. “I was sick for a while after the barn-fire. Mags did what she could, but my foot must’ve got infected. I was hot and dizzy for days, and my head ached.” It’s aching now, a dull warning.
Agnes is watching her face. “Weren’t there ever any rumors about me? After?”
Of course there were rumors: people hissed that Agnes was a whore and a hedge-witch, that she cursed the ewes to lamb out of season and lay down with devils before running off to the city to fornicate.
“No.”
Agnes grunts, very nearly amused, then sighs long and slow. “Well. It’s no secret now: I got myself in a family way. You remember Clay, the Adkins boy?”
There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.
“Sure I remember him.”
“Well, he and I . . . I was lonely and he was nice enough, and one thing led to another.” Her voice goes young and soft. “Mags figured it out before I did.”
Juniper thinks of all the girls she used to see slinking across the back acres to Mags’s house, looking for the words and ways to unmake the babies in the bellies. Not all of them young or unwed—some were too old for childbearing or too sick, or had too many hungry mouths already. Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Agnes is rubbing her thumb over the ball of her belly now. “She . . . helped me. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurting. Like shedding a skin, coming out brighter and bigger. Afterward I buried it beneath a hornbeam on the east side of the mountain, and I thought that was the end of it. I told the Adkins boy to get gone and stay that way. I thought nobody would ever know.”
Juniper remembers all her daddy’s lectures on Eve’s curse and original sin, descending into slurred rambles about weak-fleshed women and their whoring ways. She remembers his eyes gleaming red in the gloom in the barn, his bones showing white through stretched-taut skin, and begins to understand. “How did he find out?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Not a soul except Mama Mags.” Agnes’s mouth twists, venom in her voice. “And Bella, of course. I told her everything back then.”
“She never—”
“She did. I was watering the horses because Mags said it was fixing to freeze overnight.” Crow County slinks back into her voice, sly and drawling. “Then Daddy turns up and I could see in his face that heknew, about me and Clay, about the pennyroyal and the thing beneath the hornbeam. And then I saw Bella creeping along behind him, all pasty white, and I knew what she’d done.”
Juniper wants to argue. She remembers the feel of her sisters’ hands in hers on summer evenings, the circle they made between them; the promise that was never said aloud but was woven in their hair, written in their blood: that one would never turn against the other. Surely Bella would have died before she broke that trust.
But then Juniper recalls the cold gray of her sister’s eyes, the secrets she keeps safe in her notebook, and stays quiet.
“I told him it wasn’t true, that Bella was a liar and a—” Agnes swallows hard, skips over something. “But he just kept walking toward me. He wasn’t even in his cups—sober as a judge, I’d swear. But he was looking at me like—like . . .”
Juniper knows exactly how he was looking at her: like she was a colt that needed breaking or a nail that needed hammering, some misbehaving thing that could be knocked back into place. Juniper had seen that look. She came running into the barn, tangle-haired, sap-sticky, arms scored by the reaching fingers of the woods, and saw her sisters huddled against the far wall. Her father prowling toward them like a wolf, like a man, like the end of days—
And then—
That unseen thing swims too close to the surface and Juniper looks away. She goes someplace else instead, cool and green.
Agnes calls her back. “Juniper. June, baby.” Juniper returns to the pretty wallpapered room, to the sister who watches her with wide eyes.
