In Calamity's Wake by Natalee Caple Read Free Book Online Page A

will not share your confession.
    I believed him when he said he was a tamer, Father, a kind of doctor for women’s wildness. I saw him put his hand on my sister’s stomach and how still she stood. And he did that to me too; he put his hand on my stomach. But I didn’t feel still, I felt like wiggling. He rubbed my stomach and then he moved his hands away and when I thought I would cry he took my hands and stroked my fingers. He rubbed my wrists and my forearms and he started telling me my fortune. He said that I would have many lovers and I would break all their hearts. He said I would die from consumption before I was twenty. He said that only my first lover would ever reach the deepest parts of me. And somehow he ended up stark naked.
    Child, Mary, you can’t be more than ten years old. You can’t even have begun to bleed?
    Yes, Father, I began this summer. My brother said later that this is what the man did with every girl and he did it so often that sometimes it worked. I knew that it was dangerous to lie with him because the moon was wrong. But, Father, I had so much bad courage in the dark.
    My father rubbed the heels of his hands hard on his knees as he breathed out ragged and loud. He gave her the requisite instructions for penance but whenshe finished he went to his bookshelf and drew off a book I had never seen before and he took money from the centre of that book and folded it into her palm.
    Tell your mother I owe her this and more, he said, for helping with Martha.
    The next day I listened to him argue with a man who was helping a neighbour. I listened to an argument that never betrayed its point and so was pointless. When the man walked away my father held onto the knot in his cincture looking like he could hurt someone. But he couldn’t.
    I HAD meant to ride until the dark stopped me but a storm, and with it sudden night, forced me to set up camp while my horse pawed the ground and thrashed her head about. Snorts and the clattering of her teeth were interrupted by low, disturbed whinnies. She backed up against her reins and tried to pull free from the little tree where she was tied. When sheet lightning rendered the scene I could see that her eyes were wild, the whites bright in her face. I left my tent and stood in the cracking darkness wiping waves of water from her neck, holding her head still, blocking her when she wanted to plunge, rubbing her face and pulling her ears so she would listen to me. Long rolls of sound vibrated the earth underfoot. The shadowy tree branches wavedoverhead. My fingers grew stiff until I couldn’t unbend them. I slept leaning into her, starting each time she shook or swayed.
    A stiff bark woke me. I shook rain from my face and looked around, straining at the darkness. My hands were numb and blue, hooked into the reins, and my arms, neck and back were full of stinging nettles. In flashes, near the sodden handkerchief of my tent, I saw a long body. I felt sick and my vision failed for a second. The curvature and the length of the figure suggested the body of a large woman. But the neck was too thick, too long. I pulled my hands free. They were useless. I crept forward and saw the graceful head, the eyes open and frozen, and the great dark gash across the cheek. My boot touched the fresh blood of a killed deer.
    I shook my arms and bit my hands until they were mine again. I looped a noose around the deer’s neck and threw the other end of the rope over a high thick branch and with the leverage of another tree I hung the deer until I heard a crack and saw her overhead. I tied her off, and moved our camp as far as I dared in the dark. In spite of gratitude and hunger, I did not want to be beside a dead deer when whatever barked in the night returned for its dinner.
    A few hours later, in the morning, I stepped out and saw ravens squalling in the sky. I left my horse andwalked with the saddlebag that contained my knife and hatchet and some rope back to