did not stir. There came a riffle behind the trunk and a smell like the metallic stink of feathers, and then the musk of urea and rotting flesh. The aroma clasped the whole loft. Behind the steamer trunk, the head of a buzzard jutted up. Gray, creased flesh and no wattle, but one gray-rimmed black eyeball cocked at him now. Its head was not like the red head and neck of local turkey vultures. Instead the gray head bore scales and a defined bib of gray, scaly armor on its neck. Dull gray scales stretched up to the crown of its head.
“Hettienne,” he called, louder this time.
The girl did not move. But the buzzard, in a ceremony of threat, raised the stiff arms of its wings, extending their tips like massive fingers. On their undersides, glaring feathers of pure white glowed at each wingtip. Its narrow legs, now exposed, were a shocking white. It bobbed its head, making a barking sound, high-unnh, high-unnh.
Setting the shotgun and flashlight down, James moved swiftly. With its wings unfurled, the vulture, just bigger than a tom turkey, could not navigate much. It tottered and hissed to fend off his approach. Then it arched its neck and vomited a splash of amber half-digested matter at him.
He grabbed for its nape just at the bill, hooking his thumb behind its bare head, knotty, prickly, and hard as an oak gall. Wrapping his fingers under its beak and neck, he jerked the bird upward. Then, with all he could muster, with both hands clasped on the thing, he lifted it up off its feet and whirled it around his head until the neck popped.
- 6 -
The flashlight seemed diminished, rocking there on the slats of a floor. All else was very still, and yet there was over the whole space around him a great whirring sound like the band for a sawmill attached to the flywheel of a steam engine and running full out, thrumming low and loud. He had fainted. In the loft above the stone stable. Fainted.
The bird he had flung from him, he knew not where. He put the flashlight on Hettienne, who stared back at him with that same wide, blank look from before. James thought it was like being stared at by someone dead, the shock so great that he pointed the light to the rafters, raking the yellow cone across the roof decking. No gaps, all solid. How had the creature gotten up here with her?
“Hettienne,” he said, shining the light back on her.
Like holes down which the tail of something dark-scaled has just vanished, her blank eyes consumed him. He crawled toward her. Her pupils shrank, the eyes bounded and grew focused, the irises blooming. She gasped and clutched her legs to her chest. Then she scooted backward, gulping.
“Hettienne?”
Hettienne raked her knees and arms, gaping at her ointment-smeared palms. The bell sleeves of one of Margaret’s weskits rolled back. She remembered the fireworks, then putting this weskit on, swaddling herself in the family armor of a roomy hand-me-down. Awful dreams, and then she awakened here. Downstairs in the stables, a mare grumbled.
Gripping her ankle, James whispered, “Darling child? How did you get up here? Like this? And that thing up here with you?”
She shook her head, found herself breathing hard and rough as an animal on the run.
He put a hand out to her, and to his surprise she grabbed it and hurtled herself against him. “I’m right here,” he said, grunting at her force. “You’re in the loft. Nothing’s wrong.” He gathered her shoulders, and the salve clung to his shirt and overalls and stung his forearms and chin. Questa Volta grumbled low. “Well . . . almost nothing is wrong.”
“I have all this burning stuff on me,” she moaned. “What is it?”
“Sss. It’s that horse liniment. The stuff you’ve put on Questa Volta after a hot walk.”
To keep her nose from running clean out, she took in a great big slurping snort that made her sound to James just like her mother. “How do I get it off? If Simon finds out, if Mother finds out!” She was clutching the weskit and making snorting animal noises of frustration. “They’ll give me electroshock. They’ll throw me in Dunning! What am I going to do, Uncle James?”
“Listen.” He shook her hard.
The shake stopped all the whirling and the fear. She was with him, listening.
“Nothing like that is going to happen.” He kept ahold of her slick arms. “There will be no shock treatment. What is Dunning? The nuthouse? Okay. Well, no nuthouses. We’re walking down to the Sac, and you’re going to wash this stuff off of you.”
That sounded fine so far. “And then what?”
“Smuggle you back in the house while it still sleeps.”
“I’ll be soaking wet.”
“Well, that can be explained a bit better than whatever in the world this is all about. How did that god-awful buzzard get up here?”
She stared at him “Buzzard?”
He paused a while, only his eyes moving. “A buzzard the like of which I never seen was up here with you.”
She shook her head. In a whisper, she said, “I don’t know how I got up here.”
James whistled low. “Come on, then. Help me.”
He bent and handed her the Roy Boy. The horse liniment came in a white ceramic crock, heavy as an old merchant jar, with a ringed hasp and gasket lid. When she clamped it down, a solid smack shut off the blazing vapor. She stretched an arm out, and the whiteness of the liniment intensified the paleness of her skin. “It burns like Hell.”
“Well, it’s on the front and sleeves of your nightshirt, too. Be careful.” From her stomach to the middle of her chest, the cotton of the weskit was shining and rumpled. “At least you kept it mostly on your arms and legs.” He gathered the shotgun and flashlight.
“It’s on you, too. It’s on my palms. Why? Uncle James?”
“Maybe growing pains. Take that sorry old lamp.” He nudged her toward the stairs. “Were you having a Charley horse? Do you get those?”
“All the time. Hey. Where’s this buzzard now?”
“Dead. Let’s move.” Downstairs, he stuck the flashlight at the groom’s pantry. “Get that Castile soap. Shove it in my overalls here. Both bars.” He leaned forward so she could shove two waxy blocks of Castile soap in the front pocket of his overalls.
“Would all the fireworks make it roost in here?” Hettienne asked.
“Keep your voice down,” he warned. “Never seen one like it. He was all black with a gray head. You could see right through the nostril in his nasty beak. Look, we’ve got to get you to the river and washed and smuggled back in the house. Crabby-ass Simon could lose his mind over this. Or your father or poor mother will.”
- 7 -
Near the bridge on Buffalo Road, a gravel bar spread out in the water far enough from the house for splashing not to be heard. There the water ran swift and warm and deep.
In the moonlight, she could tell she must be a jolt to behold. With her hair fallen and wearing the white, smeared weskit, she was like a faerie girl in some nightmare. She could see the streaks of the same Roy Boy on James’s front and on his face.
As the two of them approached, a nova of light arched above the riverbed, and voices carried through the trees. James pressed a hand to her back. “I don’t know who’s there, darling,” he whispered. “Let’s sneak a look. It’s going to be . . . all right.”
They crouched down in brush at the berm just before the land descended to the river bottom, and there they lay flat as partisans in ambuscade. Down in the riverbed, a loud male voice was trying to tell some story, but he kept backtracking and getting tangled and confused. Two women’s voices, one grating and whining, goaded him.
James strained his neck and peered over the berm, and Hettienne edged up