Page 19 of The Devil Knows Her Name

“Oh, yes. Yes, I will.”

I never spoke to Laura Macoun again, although I watched from afar as she married the boy who’d lived two doors down from her all his life, then moved away from Burrsville the moment her father passed and she received her inheritance.

My own mother died two years after that picnic, her womb riddled with cancer. She refused to see a doctor; her fear of men had become the driving force of her decision-making. I nursed her as best as I could, although toward the end she lived almost entirely on wine I’d spiked with laudanum to dull her agony. When I learned what had killed her, I tongued the stamp on the inside of my mouth and wondered if this was the memory of God working, punishing her for birthing me.

But the terror of the real world quickly overrode my terror of the metaphysical one. The offers for the land had come trickling in as soon as word got around that she was sick, and now I was alone, unmarried in any traditional sense. I needed help and protection.

These were the things that drove me, through my tears, to snip off locks of my dead mother’s hair, to pluck out her eyelashes, to dig out six of her teeth, to cut open her fingers and tear out their bones. The second time the devil came to me, I was sobbing and hysterical, braced over my mother’s body with pliers in her mouth. He was the one who pinned down her wrists, who told me the twitching was nothing more than a response from the nerves.

I took her spells of distraction and forgetfulness, spells designed to make us invisible, and made them stronger. She had used only the mildest plants, but I sought out my darkest sisters, henbane and hemlock and datura. It was long, slow work, and for three years I did nothing but make everyone in Burrsville forget me, forget the land, until I was only a familiar stranger.

It was just after this that I planted my roses, weaving my magic into their young, tender roots and passing some of my burden to them. With my safeguards in place, I took myself through the woods and across the pond to where Norman’s half-built cabin waited, and I laid claim to everything.

Chapter

7

Despite the uncomfortable visit to the pastor’s house, the next days passed in a blur of autumn’s usual demands. I spent my hours harvesting apples, berries, pumpkins, and squashes, each one of them so full of juice and flavor that they felt fit to burst in my hand. When I wasn’t harvesting them, I was moving them into dry storage or canning them or preparing the orchards and garden beds for next season, and all the while I was feeding animals and cleaning cages.

One morning, as I shoved my feet into my shoes, harvest basket over my elbow, I glimpsed the fawn with her head upraised in a shaft of autumn sunlight, blinking softly. She was too little yet to see out the window, and so far she’d been content to stay curled in a ball in the corner until feeding time, just as a wild fawn would, but suddenly I was loathe to leave her in the dim house. She’d wanted to live so fiercely that she’d chewed her way out of her mother; surely she deserved to feel the sun, to see the wind move through the meadow grass, to smell the apples fermenting in the orchard.

“Come on,” I said, pulling aside a panel and scooping her up under my free arm. Her heart throbbed against my palm as I carried her outside, and when I set her down, she stood splay-legged and hesitant. For a moment, I thought she’d collapse back into a ball, but instead she took a tentative step after me, then another, and followed me out into the orchard. I glanced furtively over my shoulder as I walked, unable to hide my smile; there was always something wondrous about seeing an animal learn, even if it was the simple functions of their own body. She fell once, tripping in the long grass and going down hard on her chin, but before I could even reach her she was up again, her ears flicking with uncertainty.

“See, you’re all right,” I said. “You didn’t even need me.”

The grass beneath the trees was littered with fallen apples, some so soft that they collapsed to mush beneath my boots, some still green and hard. I set about harvesting from the higher branches with my long-handled basket—cautiously at first, not wanting to frighten the fawn, but she only watched inquisitively. Eventually, when I glanced to check on her, she had her head down nosing at the scattered fruit, and I set about my task in earnest.

When my bag was full, I set it down in the shade and wandered over to her. She was focused intently on the grass, and as I approached, I heard a soft crunch. She was far too young to graze yet, and I bent down curiously to see what she was doing. She jerked her head up, a strip of apple skin dangling between her teeth.

All around us, the apples on the ground were marked with little perforated rings. On most of them, the white flesh was still attached—she wasn’t eating them, simply biting them. She bent and sunk her teeth into another piece of fruit, and I laughed as she worked the bite around her mouth and spit it out again.

“Well, if you have those teeth, you might as well find out what they do, huh? Keep practicing.”

After that, the fawn became my near-constant companion. At first it was just taking her out with me to pick apples; the deer practically lived in the orchard at this time of year, and I wondered if I could orchestrate a positive—or at least neutral—encounter. But strangely, they were never there when I brought her out, and I’d seen neither hide nor hair of Mac since I brought the fawn home.

She proved good at following me, staying as close as if she were on a tether, and I began to bring her into the barn as I fed and cleaned the other enclosures, or down to the gate as I ripped out the invasive wild parsnip that found its way onto my land, or out to the forest as I harvested the fallen trees for my own firewood. She became accustomed to the clang of dishes and the whistle and thunk of my axe. She got more exercise than a fawn her age normally would, but under the accumulating pile of her oddities, my rules had all crumbled to dust.

As she got stronger and more confident, she only became stranger. She waited impatiently by the door for me before my trips to the barn, but once there she stood inside with her nose pressed against the wire mesh of the stalls, staring hard at the raccoon or skunk or woodchuck I was feeding. It made the other animals nervous; they would retreat to the highest and farthest corners of their pens, going still and silent except for the occasional timid hiss.

“It’s not polite to gawk,” I told her. “You’ll see plenty more where they came from when you’re on your own.”

It was only a few days later that I decided the young raccoon was ready to go back to the wild. He’d been exploring the outdoor part of his enclosure fearlessly, and several times I caught him hanging from the top mesh, as if frustrated he couldn’t climb any higher. It was time.

Release days always had an undercurrent of melancholy for me. The average person seemed to be under the delusion that life in the wild was a pastoral existence; “I’m so glad they can roam free,” was the common refrain when I told people I ran a sanctuary.

In reality, wild animals lived under a staggering amount of stress. Both predators and prey were at the mercy of weather, parasites, disease, the compounding human influences of traffic, habitat loss, pesticides, traps, and hunting, and, of course, the need for food.

In the sanctuary, the stressors were muted. My magic held nature in balance, and without the extremes of drought and starvation, the animals were less susceptible to disease and parasites. It would be healthier with a more robust population of apex predators, but I didn’t see myself convincing people to reintroduce wolves here anytime soon. Regardless, nature was never gentle. No matter how much balance I helped create, there would always be the hunter and the hunted.

The woods closed around us as we walked, the sun-warmed grasses of the meadow disappearing behind a beguiling play of cool green leaves and fronds. The dancing shadows made the footpaths hard to see, and had I not known them so well, I would have wandered off track and found myself lost. The trees liked to keep things when they could.

As I traveled toward the deep part of the forest, my thoughts were not on the general health of the ecosystem I so jealously protected. They were on this one little life in this carrier—whether he’d be able to find food and relative safety on his own, whether his young muscles were strong enough to climb trees instead of the easy handholds in his pen, whether he would survive the night.

We wended our way around the outskirts of the rose and blackberry thicket, and I glanced over my shoulder to check on the fawn. She was right at my heels, long-lashed eyes fixed on the carrier, stretching her neck every so often as if she wanted to touch it with her nose.

“Not much farther to go,” I told her quietly.

The pond, for all I tried to avoid it, was a good place to release animals. It was a vital source of water in the most pristine part of the forest, insulated from the farmland that surrounded the sanctuary, and the woods there were full of hollows and burrows upon which prey animals depended.