You’re coming home with me and that animal can rot to Kingdom come, True told Frainey. There were tears coming out of the pillows of her eyes as she made her voice irrefutable. Frainey had not seen eyes leak emotion since the day her parents went in the ground. She had seen nothing more in those days than Chippewa’s emotionless eyes, those cold bone buttons dry as drought staring back at her every time the goat wanted, wanted, wanted. Nor had she heard words. Human. Vocal. Outside of her head. Words damp with intent and concern. True’s tears made her words swell in front of Frainey’s eyes. If True’s words had been gashed into a stone tablet by a stab of lightning they couldn’t have sounded any more almighty, and it seemed they penetrated the layers of evolution that Frainey had to claw her way back up from because her eyes flashed with the first human reaction True had seen from her all day. Moisture.
True eyed the house, then Frainey, then reason.
Do what you have to, she said.
Frainey nodded. Her tongue was still hard lodged in her mouth, a catch of sticks and leaves damming a stream, but True could see she was trying to clear a path for words, the first to minnow out in many days. It hurt to watch Frainey’s body wrench itself into a speaking state. She gurgled like a pump back-washing with air. She choked out an initial I, and swallowed hard, and paused to catch her breath, and with even more struggle forced up a dried husk of will. It took all hers to do so. She had to cull it from the very ends of her being to bring it out of a cave into the open. True softened towards her a bit—a bit. She guessed the effort to say those five letters—no peon heaving blocks of stone to raise a stepped-up temple probably ever exerted more.
Such is the way life becomes a drama. The story starts with a fever and becomes a double departing, then a hole in the ground makes an orphan and sadness turns it wild. Every story’s beginning has its own abandoned ruin buried under the jungle of what came after, and no one can say why one thing or another caused this or that, nor after a while which thing caused what. The ruins under the jungle are many, some big, some small, all telling, but there’s no telling for certain what they really tell. So we grab on to something to give blame a foundation that isn’t a hidden block of stone; instead, something over which we have the power to point away from ourselves or the random fall of fate and say you, you, you, or in this case, goat, goat, goat.
Frainey didn’t make herself a wild thing. Her parents’ passing didn’t make her a wild thing. Chippewa didn’t make her a wild thing. The fever did. But a fever is air, and if you can’t see air, how can you avenge it?
Do what you have to do, True told Frainey. Was life in New Eden ever anything other than this?
Frainey was scrubbed clean and naked to the day and closer to human than she had been since when. They were outside looking up at the porch and at the front doorway and at the goat standing in it with its back end facing out, and as they passed that single thought wordlessly between them, the goat simply flicked her tail at them and dunged.
If True hadn’t been there to witness it, if she hadn’t seen it and smelled it and heard it and buried it under the jungle of her own ruins and sprinkled about bits of it like little arrowheads, not a one would know Frainey’s lifelong bugaboo or about the day she set herself free.
True had told her to do what she needed to do and Frainey knew, she just knew. The hand was a mere step ahead of the head when she went to the barn and plucked the key off the peg on the beam and went to the back stall where her grandfather’s trunk with the lock on it sat and clunked that key into the lock and chunk went the cog and the hinges squealed like little pigs but sounds didn’t matter anymore—in that locked trunk was a handled blade that would put any sound to sleep. The blade was worn and chipped (it had cut through something that didn’t take cutting lightly), and the cutting edge was dark rust with what once must have been old red. The handle took to Frainey’s hand like a friend remembering, and the smooth worn wood of it said words to her she had never before heard but understood the meaning of like a grandfather’s kiss. There was something else in the trunk with it—two somethings, two small bird nests, honey-colored with age, and resting in one like a forgotten egg was a blood clot of dried-up gristle no bigger than a mushroom of dung, and in the other, the same thing, only much smaller.
You go through one door and the world changes you; you go through another door and you change it back. Frainey came out of the barn a naked warrior, blood-lusted and sword on high, everything about her girded, and, as True later recalled, even her eensie-teensies seemed perked for battle. She passed by True in the yard with eyes fixed on the house and the front doorway and the squirming atrocity within. She didn’t look at True, didn’t try to cough out any words, she went in the house and shut the door behind her. The deed was on. She was doing what she had to do.
True didn’t see what actually happened, she heard it, or turned what she heard into a version of what happened. The scuffle of hoof as it skidded on wet dung and slopped straw across a wood plank floor. Snapping sounds, crackings, chairs maybe, or tables, definitely crockery shattering, lots of it. There were thuds big enough against walls that they must have been bodies, Frainey’s or Chippewa’s, or both, and the whole house shook with each hard slam, windows rattled and whatever panes hadn’t been bashed out now fell out. Then one goat moan. Only one, low and done. Then silence.
June riffed in the leaves and a few bird beaks knocked wood off a ways, but beyond that all was summer peaceful, out and in.
True might have entered the house after a pass but the stench exhaling from it suddenly grew stenchier. Something in the dung pungency and the blast of splattered urine and filth had an added odor, something fresher was in it now, a gush of something intestinal, bloody, vile, a stink born of life coming to an end. True, for one of the few times in her life, was scared now for her friend, truly scared. Frainey? she called into the dark stench, Frainey? But Frainey didn’t answer. True was ready to steel her lungs and stomach and enter. Frainey? she called one last time, but Frainey didn’t answer again, so True put one foot on the porch step to start her climb to who-knows-what, and before she placed both feet on that mission Frainey’s voice met her halfway. She called back out, Mama? Mama? It was a shock. The voice. The words. The words were wrong, but at least the sounds came. Right? That’s what True’s always said. At least the sounds came. There are worse things in this world than being wrongly called Mama.
The front door opened and Frainey emerged into the end of the day, bloodied but not bleeding, bruised but not blackened, smeared but not caked, spent but not broken, numb but not lifeless, moist-eyed but not crying, untamed but not wild, human but not entirely. She had the handled blade in one hand, with so much blood on it and herself that True couldn’t tell which one was bleeding. She was clutching a glob of something with her other hand and it too, hand and glob, was blood on blood confused. She passed True, didn’t look at her, didn’t say another word, didn’t even look to True like she had mistakenly called her Mama, didn’t even matter anyway, Frainey was headed back to the barn and the stall in the back and the trunk that had been her grandfather’s and she would get there like a mist gets where it’s going.
True crept after her silent as fog herself and watched Frainey lift the trunk lid and listened to the hinge pigs squeal, and saw her place the bloodied blade back inside the box. And the other thing, too. First she moved the smaller of the two pieces of gristle that looked like dung mushrooms into the nest with the bigger one—now they looked like mother and child gristle sleeping as one. Then into the empty nest she placed the bloodied glob. It was fat and fatty; tubes off it were chop cut and dripping. It didn’t look to True like anything she had ever seen, but then it did, and when it did, something in her seized—the same thing that seized in Frainey at the sight of the key. It was a heart. It was Chippewa’s heart. It too would shrink to gristle one day resembling something it once was. Frainey shut the lid and looped the lock and clunked it closed and hooked the key on its peg on the beam and what little came of her life from that moment on was hung there, too.