Page 22 of The Devil Knows Her Name

“At least her guts are on the inside,” I said. That was a surprisingly common defect I saw in small animals—raccoons and rabbits emerging pink and hairless, their intestines gleaming like half-eaten cherries in the seam of their stomachs. They were born dying, and if I wasn’t quick enough to remove them from the nest, their mothers killed them outright.

That calf was killed by her mother too, just hours after I left. Some people would point to that as proof that animals ran purely on instinct, some internal mechanism weighing survival chances and resources and competition and acting accordingly. But I believed it was something like mercy—that within the limits of their own understanding about the world, they knew these offspring were too broken to live life as they were meant to live it.

Not for the first time, I wondered if my own mother had sensed my brokenness when I was placed in her arms, slick and squalling. Had she sensed the bottomless thing inside me that demanded to be fed? Had she known I could not fulfill witchhood or even womanhood as she understood it, gentle and peaceful and asking only to be tolerated? It would’ve been so easy to hold a pillow over my face, to let my grandmother find me blue and cold in the bassinet.

But I was alive and my mother was dead, and the fawn could’ve said the same. Perhaps that was why I felt such a kinship with her, why I couldn’t shake the idea that her teeth were a gift, be they from the devil or from nature. Her strangeness was not a defect, not a thing that made her weaker or slower or more likely to die. In fact, she had survived against all odds.

I did finally see Mac again, grazing at the farthest corner of the orchard with several other deer. She made to bolt as soon as I stepped out on the porch, so I didn’t try to approach her, but she looked fat and sleek beneath the mottle of her half-turned coat.

“She might’ve been right about you,” I said to the fawn as I did her midmorning feeding. She only blinked up at me, a spatter of milk somehow adorning her forehead, and I couldn’t help but smile.

But I didn’t take her with me as I headed down the driveway to the gate, toolbox and bucket in hand. Now that she’d wandered away once, I’d have to be more careful about where I went with her, and the road seemed like an obviously bad choice. Besides, gate maintenance could take hours.

The gate at the end of the driveway was a holdover from a more optimistic decade. I’d thought the sanctuary could truly be a community resource, and I’d had plans for an education center, a volunteer program, and guided tours. The tours were the easiest thing to get started, and at first I’d put aside my uneasiness at having families tramping through the woods, toddlers ripping up wildflowers and shrieking with angst or delight until they frightened off the birds.

Then people started showing up whenever they pleased, thinking it was some kind of petting zoo or park. I’d find them in my garden or picking fruit in the orchard or wandering through the barn, poking their fingers through the mesh and making kissy noises at the animals. The sandwich board I put up in the middle of the driveway was ignored, and so too was the chain across; people would just drop it in the dirt and drive over it.

The gate had come at the right time. Rebecca Wiles of the Wiles Button Factory, Burrsville’s only real money, died in her sleep, possibly suffocated by one of her dog-sized Maine coons. Although she had children, they had all fled Burrsville for more convenient suburbs and had no interest in coming back, and so an estate sale was held.

Since I lacked the rest of Burrsville’s interest in trading trash, even with a dead rich woman, I had no intention of going. But I had driven by, and that’s when I noticed the gate—a twelve-foot wrought iron monstrosity so heavy it had bent the cheap hinges they put it on, propped open with its locking end supported by an ancient milk crate.

“Is that for sale?” I’d asked the organizer.

She’d looked at me with distaste; we were all vultures here to strip the flesh off a corpse, but I was a particularly egregious one. “If you can find a way to remove it and transport it, sure,” she said finally.

That had been no small task; it took a rented flatbed and a small crew of migrant workers who were between crops and happy to be paid a day’s wages for an hour’s work. Even after I got it home, it was a month before I had sourced and set posts big enough to support it, had hinges made to carry it, and rigged up a pulley system to lift it. It had been a faithful guardian against trespassers since then, and when I gave up the tours and any notion that I wanted to share the sanctuary with people, I was especially glad to have it.

But it did need its fair share of maintenance, and so I went down the drive with my bucket and rag to wash the road dirt and bird shit off every spike and corner and ornate detail. As I fell under its shadow, the bars leaving stripes across my arms, I couldn’t help but think of the pastor’s son, his face lighting up at the mention of the sanctuary. If he’d come along thirty years ago, I might not have abandoned the idea of volunteers, the hope that people could learn.

Stupid, I thought. Everyone loves the idea of the sanctuary. No one likes shoveling shit or processing rats for the foxes, though.

I was halfway through the gate’s coat of epoxy primer when I heard a car come up the road, and somehow I wasn’t surprised to see Broder’s cruiser pull over at the end of the drive. I’d thought for years that Burrsville could have saved some money by downsizing its full-sized police department to part-time work—especially when towns twice our size were doing it—and Broder’s apparent ample free time to stick his nose into my business only confirmed that.

The cruiser stopped inches from the gate, as if Broder expected me to open it for him. When I just waved, rag in hand, and made no move toward the lock, he got out begrudgingly.

“Afternoon, Tess.”

“Hey, Chief. Not sick of me yet? I’ve seen you more this week than I usually do in a month.”

Broder ignored this. He looked around a little, stretched; something in his back popped like pork gristle. He tipped his hat up, admired the trees.

“This is a real nice piece of land you got here, Tess.”

I was immediately on alert. It was, by the standards of Burrsville small talk, an innocuous thing to say; my friends said it all the time. But Broder was not my friend.

“Can’t argue with that,” I answered warily. “It’s why you don’t see me down in the village much more than I have to be.”

He chuckled a little, scratched his stomach. “Yeah, well, I get that.”

He stood there some more, sighing and scratching, and I finally realized he was trying to ice me. What about, I didn’t know, but he probably didn’t either; he just wanted to see what would happen if he stood there long enough. The bad news for him was that I had two dozen twelve-foot bars and about a hundred nooks and crannies to epoxy, so there was plenty to keep me occupied for another hour yet.

When Broder realized he’d picked the wrong battle, he sidled up closer to the gate and said, “You know, Tess, I do my best to let you operate as you want. I’m not exactly Grizzly Adams, so I don’t think there’s much good in me trying to hover over your shoulder.”

“I agree,” I said, “and I appreciate that about you.”

“But the fact of the matter is, I’m just not sure I like the way you’re handling this fawn business.”

I stopped applying the epoxy, meeting his gaze squarely to let him know he had my full attention—and ire. “I’m listening, Chief, but the problem is, I don’t know what ‘business’ you mean.”