Embers & Echoes (9 page)
Back when she had a different name, a different life.
Back when a familiar fire still smoldered within her.
You always come back to look at this
scarecrow because it’s not like the others.
All the others sag on their wooden posts, made tender by the rain of a thousand New England storms, wilted from years in the wet summer heat. Their flannel and denim have faded, and their stuffing spews out of holes pecked by the very crows they were sworn to protect against. Worst of all, they always seem to be facing slightly down, even though their winged foes come from the sky. Whether they’re ashamed of the job they’re doing, or just downright depressed, you’ll never know.
But this one stands tall with intrepid lines, pulled taut arm to arm on its cedar crucifix. Its corduroys look freshly pressed, and the tartan could have come straight off the clothesline. The straw pokes out only at the knees, where the corduroys are knotted, and at the throat, puffing proudly out like a mane of chest hair.
Perhaps this is why this scarecrow looks arrogantly up and to the west, toward the setting sun.
Perhaps this is why Horatio McGrath has the most spotless crops in all of York County.
Perhaps this is why you almost feel guilty that you’re about to burn this scarecrow alive.
“Are you absolutely sure he’s gone to church?” you ask your older sister, who at fifteen years old—one year older than you—is boss in this jurisdiction.
Violet smirks. “He’s a good Baptist. Now get a move on, Lucy, and throw some wood on that little stove of yours.”
You stare at the scarecrow one last time and silently apologize to it. Then you drop down onto your hands and knees in the dry grass, which crackles under your weight. It’s been an exceptionally dry summer, and it’s been weeks now since there was a good rainfall. Even Horatio McGrath’s famous maize, the sea of corn husks behind you, is seeing the first invasions of yellow and brown on its normal healthy green, the onset of wither.
Violet stands at attention beside the scarecrow. She begins in the theatrical voice that you’ve heard many times before—twelve times, in fact, once for each scarecrow that you’ve consumed in flame in the towns of Limerick and nearby Cornish.
But those scarecrows were just practice.
“Horatio Arnold McGrath.” She holds her arms out as if she’s reading from an imaginary parchment. “Otherwise
known in these parts as the Big H.A.M., a man as ugly as his crops are spotless, flaunter of wealth, husband to a shrewish wife, and father to insufferable offspring.” As she says the last one, you glance back at the McGrath residence, an imposing white farmhouse on the hilltop, and pray that Melinda and Mary are both at church with their father.
“The court of the Sisters Whitney has summoned you before us on charges of giving dirty looks to your neighbors, coveting your neighbor’s wife”—your mother—“and leading a generally unpleasant existence. How do you plead?”
The scarecrow says nothing. It twitches in the breeze.
“Then on behalf of the tribunal convened, we find you guilty and condemn you to burn at the stake.” Violet’s eyes flash white. “Executioner ready?”
You slide your hands into the dry brush and take a deep breath. A wisp of smoke rises almost instantly from the base of the post. The heat comes with greater ease each time you tap into that vein of power you discovered running through you last year.
The fire catches and you take a step back. As you concentrate, the flames march up the post toward the crucified scarecrow. You watch with guilty delight as the fire sinks its claws into the knotted corduroy knees and starts a slow crawl up the flannel.
The process is too slow for Violet; she steps in and rips open the flannel shirt, sending the buttons showering
over the nearby grass. The fire ignites the straw within, and the slow burn transforms quickly into a blaze, no longer your careful creation but a savage and uncontrollable beast.
“We deliver you unto the all-consuming fires of hell,” Violet shouts over the blaze. The scarecrow’s once-proud face wilts and turns its attention to the ground as it passes into the great beyond. “May God Almighty have mercy on your soul.”
Then something happens that has never occurred during any of your previous executions: The fire has grown so hot that it has somehow devoured the middle of the scarecrow’s post. The post cracks in half loud enough to send birds soaring off from a nearby tree in an explosion of black wings. Your victim crashes headfirst to the ground, and the grass around him ignites, tinder for the burning.
“Violet!” you shriek. “Put it out!”
Violet reaches for the sky and bunches up her face.
“Hurry up, Violet!”
“I—I can’t,” she stutters. “It’s too dry! The rains won’t come! Can’t
you
control what you’ve made?”
You stagger back. The fire continues to creep out through the grass, an ever-widening bull’s-eye with the blazing effigy at its center. “Maybe if it were a candle flame on a wick,” you snap. “I can’t contain
this
!”
“Then it’s time to go,” Violet says quietly. She tugs at your dress.
You point to the old stone well on the other side of
the blaze, and the metal bucket propped against it. “We can still douse it with well water before it hits the fields!” You start to skirt your way around the blaze.
Violet catches you by the elbow, her grip so fierce that you’re sure it will leave a handprint on your skin. “We both know that it’s too late.” She stares deep into your eyes the way only Violet can. “Think about it. This never happened in any of the other executions. Maybe we should take this as a sign that God
wants
to punish McGrath for what he’s done.”
For what he’s done.
Violet must be referring to your family tragedy last summer, but of course you have no proof that McGrath wronged your family. What you do have is suspicion. Memories. Dark possibilities. You picture the festival last year in the town center. You picture the hazy, distant but ill-intentioned sheen over McGrath’s eyes after all that whiskey.
Mama’s strange silence and insistence that you all leave.
Finding her crying in the barn later that night.
Finding her hanging in the barn a month later.
Violet’s grip on your arm retracts. Her hold on you does not.
You don’t look down, but you can feel the heat of the flames that are almost upon you. You nod at her. “Then let God’s will be done.”
The two of you scurry up the hill and past the imposing
McGrath estate. It’s only when you’re beyond the back of the house that one of the curtains parts and you see Melinda’s sallow, sickly face watching you through the glass.
The dinner table is oddly
silent tonight at the Whitney farm. Not that it’s been all that chatty since Mama exited this world with the creak of a rope. Grace sits silently in the high stool Papa built for her. Papa moves the corn around on his plate. Even Violet seems to have retracted into grim silence—Violet, who normally laughs in the face of the law.
You always knew that Papa was the one who loved you more. The adoption had been his idea, when after five years of marriage he and Mama had remained childless. As the only surviving children from each of their families, they’d all but accepted that the Whitney and Carlson family trees had reached a mutual end.
Then a lobsterman, a family friend, was out setting traps just off Bar Harbor when he heard the crying. As his small boat approached a buoy, he found a wooden washtub snagged in the seaweed . . . and, inside it, two children who were clearly not Maine natives. One was nearly a year old and remained strangely silent even as the men pulled her up onto the boat. But you couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old at the time, swaddled in an old stretch of canvas and wailing your little lungs out. The story goes that you had a mighty fever, that until they
brought you below deck and out of the sun, your little body was burning up with a raging heat.
You wouldn’t be able to appreciate the irony until thirteen years later.
When the lobsterman brought the girls to the Whitney farm (he never went to the authorities), Papa didn’t consider how the color of your skin might change the way the neighbors treated the Whitneys. He didn’t care that you and Violet were both girls; the farm was small, easy enough for Papa to manage without any strapping young sons. He just wanted a legacy in this world beyond his toils in the field before he ended up in the family plot across the road.
Mama did eventually grow to love you, though not in the unconditional way that your father did. She grew to love the sixth sense you seemed to have when it came to baking, how you knew exactly when the chicken or the bread or, on those lucky nights, the casserole had cooked properly. She grew to love the way that Violet’s outlandish stories made everyone laugh, without realizing how that same skill would eventually allow Violet to blossom into a masterful liar.
Little Gracie was a different story, one that made even your buoy rescue sound like a typical adoption.
You were ten at the time. Papa always told you not to play hide-and-seek in the cornfields, but you played anyway. You had just found a gap in one of the cornfield lines and wiggled your way through, not bothering
to think of what Mama would say about the dirt clumps on your dress.
You heard rustling through the stalks in front of you. Knowing that Violet would soon catch you, you decided to get the better of your older sister by scaring her first. So you plunged through the leaves and hurled through the last row of stalks with a battle cry, prepared to strike.
You nearly stepped on the baby. She crawled—no, slithered—soundlessly, naked, through the dirt, weaving between the stalks. Even as your foot came down next to her, she didn’t even look up at first to see what monster the foot belonged to.
But then her eyes tracked up and saw you, and she rolled onto her back and gurgled. She had the same clay skin as you and Violet, the same sharp eyes, and even the beginnings of the same ebony curls you would never be able to control on humid summer days.
Without knowing where she came from, or how she ended up in this field, you knew one thing for certain.
The girl your adoptive parents would eventually name Grace was, just like Violet, your blood sister. And she’d found her way from faraway shores to the bowels of Maine to reunite with you.
Now the three of you sit with Papa at the squeaky little table with just the light of the setting sun filtering through the open window. These days you’re the remainder of a strange and eclectic family that once felt whole but was left disjointed and sterile when you found Mama
in the barn. It’s like the one woman who’d always felt like the odd one out had somehow been a linchpin to your family’s happiness.
“You’re awful quiet,” Papa says in the thick Maine accent the three of you somehow failed to adopt when you learned English. “All three of ya.”
In the silence that follows, you and Violet exchange a look over the corn and potatoes. Grace gurgles. For a four-year-old, she’s always acting more like she’s two, and even though she does talk on occasion, you wonder whether she’s really all there.
“Just at the end of my wick from playing out in the fields,” Violet lies. She reaches for the butter. “I think I got a bit sunburned on my neck too.”
This at least gets Papa to chuckle. “My island girls—a darker shade than the Maine natives, but still not impervious to the sun.” His grin fades when he turns to you. He hasn’t smiled at you in a long time. Does it have something to do with the fact that you were the one who found Mama? Sometimes you even have to wonder if he secretly blames you. But you know that’s absurd. Papa has never looked on you with an ounce of resentment, even when you snapped his fishing rod in half.
“And what about you, darlin’?” He leans over the table. His hand finds yours, which is closed in a fist on the table, and he shakes it gingerly. “Did you sell that charming voice and quick wit of yours to the devil?”
You can’t help but smile. “No, sir.” You pat the top of
his hand, and then pull yours away so you can reach for the carafe of milk in front of Gracie. “The only way I’d let the devil at my voice,” you say as you bring the carafe over your empty glass, “is if he pried it from my unwilling hands.”
The bullet hits the carafe. The glass shatters over the table before you can even register that the deafening bang from across the room was a gunshot. The milk splashes over your face, and Papa cries out when a sliver of glass pierces his cheek.
Horatio McGrath stands in the open doorway with a rifle snug against his breast. The bloodshot eye that gazes down the sights of his barrel twitches uncontrollably. When he smiles, his teeth burn red from the wine. If the man weren’t such an impeccable shot even when he’s drunk, the glass carafe could have very well been your head. You drop the broken bottle neck onto the table.
“Horatio!” Papa shouts. He stands up and kicks the chair out from behind him. “What the hell do you think you’re—”
McGrath flips the rifle from trigger to barrel, wheels back, and strikes Papa hard across the face with the stock. Papa hits the table on the way down. He grabs his head and moans on the floor, but he’s still conscious.
“None of y’all move,” McGrath says, returning the rifle to its perch against his shoulder.
Even Gracie stops fidgeting in her high chair. You’re
too terrified to even wipe the milk from your face.
“Now, Phillip,” Horatio says out of the corner of his mouth. He always speaks that way, even when he isn’t chewing tobacco. “This community stood by you when you decided to adopt Satan’s offspring, not once, but twice. We sympathized with your fruitless efforts to yield some real salt-of-the-earth children. I even allowed my girls to play with yours in the hopes of teaching your girls the fineries of American so-ci-e-ty.”
Papa seizes the back of the chair and winces as he raises himself to a knee. “Save your sermons for mass,” he wheezes, “and tell me why you’ve barged into my house, endangered my daughters, and cuffed a man who never raised a hand to you.”