Emmy poured water into the washbasin and dampened two cloths. She handed one to her sister. “Here, Callie. Maybe this will help.”
They sat on the edge of their beds, blotting their faces and necks. May’s milder days had given way to the warm ones of June, and if tonight was any indication, summer would be a scorcher.
Callie fanned the damp cloth in the air to make it cooler, then touched it to the back of her neck. “I might have to move up north before this summer’s over. Maybe I can get a job in the coal mines.”
Emmy giggled. “You’d probably end up the foreman, bossing all the other miners around.”
Callie got up and stood in front of the window, holding her hair up and fanning her face with her hand. “Not a solitary leaf is moving out there. Quiet as a church mouse and twice as still. I wish it would pour rain right this second—buckets and buckets of rain.”
“Me too.” Emmy pulled the hem of her nightgown up to her knees and blotted her feet and legs. “You know where I wish we were right now?”
“Where?” Callie sat back down on her bed.
“Dewberry’s Dip!” Emmy said with a grin.
Callie laughed at the thought of it—the two of them plunging into the blissfully cold, spring-fed swimming hole. It was tucked into the woods that once belonged to a sawyer named Felton Dewberry but had been part of their father’s farm for as long as they could remember. Their older brothers had named it Dewberry’s Dip.
“Wouldn’t that feel like heaven?” Emmy said.
Callie sighed and held the damp cloth against her face. “As opposed to this heat, which feels like Torment?” Their mother found the word “hell” objectionable, as if speaking it might summon it. Never mind that her daughters heard preachers say it every Sunday. She insisted that Callie and Emmy refer to the eternal fire as “Torment” or “Perdition.”
“I believe Torment would feel chilly compared to this room right now,” Emmy said, dropping her nightgown back down over her legs. “Maybe the sweat on my gown will cool me off.”
Callie watched her sister push damp tendrils of blond hair away from her face. “Emmy, why don’t we do it?”
“Do what?”
“Go to Dewberry’s Dip—right now!” Callie grabbed Emmy’s hand and clutched it the way she used to when they would get a running start, jump into the swimming hole together, and come up shivering in the chill of its cold, clear water, even on the hottest day in August.
Emmy laughed and answered with one of Hepsy’s favorite expressions. “Are you outside your mind, Callie? We can’t go rambling through the woods at night!”
“I disagree. It’s the only time we can go on a ramble because everybody who would tell us not to is asleep.”
“Callie, are you serious?”
“I am. Come on, Emmy. Let’s do it. Let’s do something girls aren’t supposed to. Or we could lie here and sweat till morning.”
Slowly, a smile spread across Emmy’s face. “If we get caught, you know Mama will never let us leave the house again.”
Callie clasped her hands together. “It’ll be worth it.”
As quietly as they could, the sisters traded their nightgowns for swim dresses, slippers, and a couple of towels from their washstand.
“The doors are too loud,” Emmy whispered.
Callie nodded and used a letter opener to unscrew the window screen at the bottom so that she and Emmy could climb out. They tiptoed off the porch, around the house, and into the backyard, then followed a narrow dirt road that led between the horse and mule barns, through a small field, and into the woods beyond. A bright moon lit their way past the shadowy rows of cotton plants growing taller and taller in the summer heat.
“Is this the road to Perdition we’ve heard so much about?” Callie whispered, which made them both laugh out loud, though they knew they shouldn’t.
Eventually, the road made a deep dip so that they could no longer see the Bullock house, and then it curved slightly east, ending in a stand of tall pine trees.
“No turning back?” Callie asked.
“No turning back,” Emmy said. “At least the excitement made me forget how hot I was. You lead the way. You’ve slipped off with Daddy and the boys enough to know the woods better than I do.”
“Just don’t step on a snake,” Callie warned, “or we’ll end up in the funeral home instead of the Dip.”
She loved the woods at night. She and her father had a long-kept secret, which she’d shared only with Emmy. Now and again, he would allow her to slip out of the house and accompany the Bullock men on a nocturnal hunt. As she soon learned, these hunts had little to do with any serious quest to kill a raccoon and were instead an opportunity for the hunting dogs—and the men—to rip and run, unencumbered, through the night. Her father somehow sensed that Callie, unlike Emmy, also needed to run free.
For those moonlit hunts, Callie kept a pair of Sam’s outgrown breeches and boots hidden in a box beneath some blankets in her chifforobe, but tonight, her swim dress and slippers would have to do. The pine straw crunched beneath her feet as the path narrowed and wound its way through towering loblollies and longleafs, which would serenely sigh and sway in the gentlest wind but were silent in the suffocating stillness of this hot night.
Memory took her back to the brisk, cold air of a November hunt with her father and brothers. The sky on that clear night had been a vast black carpet, lit by a crescent moon and dusted with millions of stars. The hounds had led them over one pine-covered hill after another, each one a little taller than the last, until finally, at the highest crest on her father’s land, Callie looked down to see what appeared at first to be an open valley below. But as her eyes adjusted to her surroundings and the moonlight did its work, she could see that her valley was in fact the river flowing smooth as a satin ribbon.
A mosquito bite brought Callie back to the heat and sweat of this summertime evening. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said over her shoulder to Emmy. “You’re wondering if I’m lost, but you don’t want to say so.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Well, maybe a little. But you know my sense of direction is terrible, so don’t take it personally.”
“I knew it!” Callie laughed. “Let me put your mind at ease. See that big white rock at the top of that hill—the one the moon is really lighting up?”
“I do.”
“Just past that rock is where the trail turns right and goes downhill before it crosses the creek—remember? And then it’s just a short walk a little further down to the Dip.”
“I never doubted you for a minute,” Emmy said.
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
They held their towels on one arm and extended the other for balance as they carefully stepped from one slick rock to another—a natural bridge across the shallowest part of the creek, which was one of many local tributaries feeding the Coosa River. Then they made a short downhill trek to the swimming hole and its promise of cold water.
Once, Dewberry’s Dip had been a freestanding spring a few hundred yards from a sharp bend in the Coosa. But over the years, the river currents had worn away at the bank until they finally claimed the crystalline pool as a slough that now spilled into the river, bluing its earthy waters with the pristine flow of an underground spring. You had only to stand on the bank to see exactly where the spring gifted the muddy river with a turquoise patch of purity. Locals called it the Bluing, and it became a landmark for hunters, fishermen, and the occasional secret rendezvous: I’ll meet you at the Bluing. The Bullock boys had felled a cottonwood tree across the mouth of the spring at the very spot where it spilled into the river, so they could easily cross from one side of the Dip to the other. Unlike the shaded swimming hole, the fallen tree lay in full sun, making it a handy spot to sit and dry off without the bother of all the red bugs in the tall grass around the water.
Callie and Emmy stepped cautiously as they made their way downhill and finally arrived at the spring. Under moonlight, Callie could see the water’s glimmering surface, smooth as a hand mirror in the still summer night. Without saying a word, she and Emmy dropped their towels, kicked off their slippers, joined hands, and jumped in. They could not contain their squeals as the ice-cold water enveloped them, washing away the heat and the sweat, leaving them to shiver in pure spring water now doused in silvery moonglow. They giggled as they swam over to a flat rock submerged beneath the surface, where they could sit in water up to their shoulders and swirl their feet and legs in the refreshing pool.
“I’d almost forgotten what a great swimmer you are,” Callie said. “Remember when we were kids and George bet you that you couldn’t swim all the way across the river? You did it, though.”
“Well, it’s narrow here,” Emmy said.
“Yes, but still. That was impressive.”
“My twelve-year-old self thanks you for the accolades. But I think this is the most wicked thing we’ve ever done.”
“Speak for yourself,” Callie answered. “I’ve gone hunting at night with Daddy and the boys, remember.”
“Well, it’s definitely the most wicked thing we’ve ever done together.”
“Agreed.”
They sat quietly, relaxing as their bodies adjusted to the chilling temperature of the spring.
“Don’t you think it’s fascinating—this water, I mean?” Callie asked.
“No.” Emmy splashed her face with water. “I just think it’s blissfully cold.”
“But think about its source. The water we’re sitting in is bubbling up from underground. Somewhere under the cotton fields, water is flowing—like the river Styx in Bulfinch’s Mythology.”
“I still can’t believe Mama allows that book!” Emmy splashed her face again.
While their mother had redone most of the Bullock home to her liking, she had kept the original library intact. All the books left behind by Brooks Calhoun—a collection that included everything from diaries of Confederate wives to poetry by the English Romantics and adventurous tales of the Greek and Roman gods—remained on their shelves, dutifully dusted by Hepsy every week. The library reflected the contradictions in their mother’s nature: It held no copy of the wildly popular stories of Jack London because Aurelia considered him a dangerous radical. Yet Callie and Emmy were free to read tales of the sensuous Aphrodite, the huntress Artemis, and poor abducted Persephone because those stories, their mother said, were “classical literature from the historic library of our home.”
Callie gently pushed back the spring water with her hands and watched the ripples glide across it. “I guess we’re all a bunch of ripples,” she said to Emmy, who was cupping water in her hand and spilling it back into the pool.
“What do you mean?”
Callie pushed the water out again. “I mean one person causes something to happen to another. Lily’s husband died. That made her come to live with Hepsy. That made Hepsy bring her to the fish fry. That made one of Hepsy’s helpers ask Lily to sing. That made Ryder notice Lily. That made Lily go into hiding. See what I mean?”
“I do.” Now Emmy pushed the water, sending small waves out in a half circle around them. “The trouble comes when somebody like Ryder doesn’t care what he pushes somebody else into.”
Callie looked at her sister. “Why does he bother you so much, Em? It’s not just what he’s doing to Lily, because you couldn’t stand the sight of him way before she got here.”
Emmy silently ran her palm over the moonlit water as Callie waited for her answer. “You know that thing Hepsy taught us to do if a boy ever got too pushy with us?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
Emmy turned to face her. “Well, it works. And thank goodness.” She pulled a cattail from the bank behind them and set it adrift on the spring water. It slowly bobbed and floated, barely leaving a trace of itself as it traveled. “Remember last spring,” Emmy went on, “when Aunt Roxie took a fall?”
Callie thought for a minute and nodded. “You went over to stay with her one night.”
“That’s right. Mama thought it might cheer her up to have some of Tirzah’s tea and a chicken casserole—a few other odds and ends. I was going to stay the night with her and make sure she took her medicine right. Well, since the Montgomerys live so close to her, Knox said he’d ask their cook to wrap up some plates for us, and he and I could have a quiet supper together after Aunt Roxie went to bed. But Ryder got wind of it somehow. He actually dressed in Knox’s clothes and combed his hair for once, then showed up at Aunt Roxie’s early—not long after I’d tucked her in with her pain medication. Ryder fully intended to pass himself off as Knox.”
Callie tossed a rock in the water. “That is just like him to think he could fool absolutely anybody.”
“I went to greet him—to greet Knox—on the front porch,” Emmy continued, “but the minute I looked into his eyes, I knew who it was. Even if I hadn’t, Ryder knows so little about his own twin that he had chosen a light blue suit Knox doesn’t like. It was a gift from Judge Armbrester, who was his mentor in law school, so he wears it in court but no place else.” Emmy paused and threw water over her shoulder, letting it spill down her back. She took a deep breath. “Even though I recognized him, he decided he’d do what he came to do anyway. He grabbed me and started trying to kiss me . . .” Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes.
Callie laid her hand on her sister’s shoulder.
Emmy turned to her. “I’ll be forever grateful to Hepsy. I’ll bet they could hear Ryder holler all the way to Georgia. I left him writhing on the porch, ran inside, and locked both doors. Then I loaded Aunt Roxie’s shotgun and hoped and prayed Knox would get there soon, which he did—right after Ryder left. Or maybe I should say right after Ryder slithered away.”
“Does Knox know?” Callie asked.
“Yes.” Emmy scooped water and splashed it on her chest and neck. “I wasn’t going to tell him at first. I was afraid it would be too hurtful for him to know his own brother cared so little about him. Now, of course, I can see Ryder was counting on that. But I was far too shaken to pretend everything was alright. And I knew I could never hide anything from Knox.”
Callie relaxed her legs and watched her feet bob up in front of her. “What did Knox do?”
“It was right around that time when Ryder supposedly took a spill on his horse and broke his jaw—you remember that?”
“Yes.”
Emmy smiled. “Knox was the horse.”
Callie’s mouth flew open, and she pushed her feet back underwater. “Kind and gentle Knox?”
Emmy nodded and laughed. “Yes, kind and gentle Knox broke his sorry brother’s jaw—with what I believe they call a right hook.”
“What did their parents say?”
“They believed the horse story like everybody else,” Emmy said. “Knox thought that would be best for me—you know how people talk and jump to all kinds of conclusions—and Ryder has way too much pride to admit he’d been spurned by a woman and whipped by his twin, so he kept his mouth shut.”
Callie patted her cheeks with spring water. “There is no end to him—to what he’ll do, I mean.”
“No, there isn’t. And you remember that, Callie. I know you don’t take him seriously, but what he intends, should he get the chance, is no joke. Never forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“Remember something else. Men like Ryder depend on your silence. Don’t ever let somebody like him convince you that you can’t tell anybody what he’s done. You shout it from the mountaintops. That’s the only thing that’s kept him from trying the same thing with me again. He knows now that I won’t be silent.”
Beneath the water, Callie took her sister’s hand and squeezed it tight.
They were sitting together without talking, looking at the moon’s reflection on the water, when they heard something in the river. It was coming from the direction of the Bluing, just beyond the Dip.
Emmy put her finger to her lips, then mimed a breaststroke. The sisters silently slipped off their rock and swam to the fallen tree, keeping their kicks and strokes underwater. Callie wasn’t as strong or skilled a swimmer as Emmy, but she managed to keep pace with her. Holding on to the cottonwood’s low-hanging limbs, they dropped down close to the water so that they could peer beneath the trunk and see what had made the noise in the river beyond.
It was Lily. She had pinned her hair on top of her head and left her clothes on the bank. Standing in water up to her shoulders, she looked up at the moon, extended her arms, and slowly twisted back and forth, trailing her hands and arms in the river. It was a scene both ethereal and sublime, like a piece of music that stirred your soul—deeply felt but impossible to describe.
The music was soon interrupted.
Callie and Emmy heard him before they saw him. Ryder’s footsteps tapped across the felled tree, and now he was standing right above their heads. Lily looked sickened at the sight of him but made no sound.
Ryder squatted down on the tree, the way you would lower yourself to calm a cowering dog. Callie was certain he cared no more about Lily than that.
“Just look at you,” he said softly. “To think I came all the way down here for a little romp with the ginner’s daughter, but I found my prize instead.”
Lily didn’t move. She was as still as a doe in the woods listening for any hint of a threat.
“I don’t know what those women have been telling you,” Ryder was saying, “but I’d never dream of hurting you, Lily. All I want to do is give you the kind of attention you deserve.”
Callie peeked under the tree at Lily. Still she didn’t move. But where could she go?
“Come on over here and let me show you how a gentleman can take care of you,” he said in a soothing voice. “You and me—we’re practically old friends. Didn’t you know that?”
Callie could see Lily stripped bare in water up to her shoulders. Just like Emmy, Lily stared straight ahead with a mixture of fear and rage, her eyes hard, her face frozen.
“Why, just last Christmas, I spotted you boarding a train at the station,” Ryder went on. “Had no idea who you were or where to find you. But now I know. From now on, I’ll make it my business to know.”
Callie heard Emmy’s breath coming hard and fast and imagined Lily’s doing the same. Looking up at Ryder’s backside jutting off the fallen tree, Callie’s own anger bubbled up until she could no longer stifle it. With a single swift motion, she used one hand to push herself up from the low-hanging tree limb and the other to shove Ryder in the rear as hard as she could, sending him tumbling into the river.
The minute he hit the water, Lily scrambled out of it and grabbed her clothes. She was frantically looking about, trying to pick a direction, when Callie waved to her from the edge of the Dip, where she and Emmy had climbed out. Without hesitating, Lily ran to them, and the threesome sprinted back up the path and through the pines.
A woman’s voice called out, “Ryder? Ryder Montgomery, where are you?”
It was surely Minnie, the ginner’s daughter, but they never stopped to look back until they had reached the Bullock house. Callie hurried to the loosened window screen and held it up, first for Lily, then Emmy.
Finally safe, the three of them stood in the sisters’ bedroom, breathing hard, dripping wet, and shivering in silence. Emmy got them towels from the washstand while Callie tiptoed to her bureau, pulled out two nightgowns, and handed one to Lily. As Lily dropped the clothes she had been clutching and took the towel, Callie caught a glimpse of her rounded belly.
She looked at Emmy. Her sister had seen it too. Lily let the gown fall and smoothed it before she looked up and met the sisters’ stunned stares.
“Lily, are you—are you expecting a baby?” Emmy asked her quietly, just above a whisper.
Lily nodded, her eyes wide and anxious.
“You were expecting when you got here?” Callie asked.
Again, Lily only nodded. But then she began to cry, silent tears streaming down her face.
Callie and Emmy rushed to her and put their arms around her. They led her to Callie’s bed and sat down on either side of her.
“How far along?” Emmy asked.
“About six and a half months,” Lily said, wiping her eyes. “Mama Tirzah says I’m mighty small for my time, but she’s sure my baby’s alright.” She wrapped her arms around her belly and smiled through her tears. “Me and Levi—that was my husband—we dreamed about the babies we’d have, raisin’ ’em up in Chicago where they could be anything they wanted to be.”
Emmy reached for the nightstand drawer and pulled out a handkerchief for Lily. She blotted her eyes and took a deep breath before telling the rest of her story, smiling at the memory of it. “I was so excited when the doctor told me about the baby. It was nearly quittin’ time at the rail yard when my appointment was over, so I didn’t even go home after. Went straight over there to meet Levi and tell him so we could go celebrate together.” Lily’s smile faded. “But the foreman says he’s not there. Says there’s been an accident and Levi’s down at the hospital. I never saw him alive again. Not long after that, I came here.”
“Oh, Lily,” Emmy said, wiping her own tears with her fingertips, “we’re so sorry.”
There in the darkness, the bedroom lit only by moonbeams streaming through the window, Callie studied the two figures next to her with a distance that, she hated to admit, came easily to her. Always, she’d had the strange sensation of living her life and observing it at the same time. Part of her never stopped watching, listening, interpreting as best she could—even with Emmy. And when she let her mind float high above that room and look down on the scene below, she couldn’t help feeling that she was meant to protect the two women beside her, even though Emmy was older and knew what it was like to fall in love, even though Lily had experienced life more directly and painfully than either of them—was in fact carrying it inside her.
“You can’t go back home, Lily,” Callie said.
Emmy and Lily both stared at her.
“You can’t go home,” Callie repeated. “You’re not safe anywhere but right here until something’s done about Ryder.”
“She’s right,” Emmy said. “You’re not.”
“Colored girl sleeping in a white house?” Lily objected. “That’s not allowed. You’d be in enough trouble just for putting me in your nightgown.”
“For tonight, the rules don’t matter,” Callie said. “We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow, but you can’t leave this house tonight—not with Ryder out there. I don’t know if he saw Emmy and me or not, but even if he did, he’d never come near Daddy’s house in the middle of the night. He’s a snake, but he’s not stupid.”
“How should we manage, do you think?” asked Emmy, who usually took the lead but tonight seemed relieved to have her younger sister in charge.
Callie thought about it. “Won’t Hepsy be missing you, Lily?”
“No,” Lily said. “I was staying with my cousin. Mama Tirzah moves me around to make it harder for anybody to find me. After everybody else went to bed, I was sitting up reading in the loft where I sleep, and it just got so hot. I thought I’d slip down to the river for a minute—doubt my cousin’s even missed me.”
“You sleep on my trundle tonight,” Callie said. “You’ve got clothes to put on for tomorrow. We’ll slip you out in the morning and you can just meet Hepsy in the kitchen for work like nothing happened.”
Together, the sisters slid the trundle from underneath Callie’s bed. Emmy fetched a pillow and light spread from a trunk at the foot of her bed. “I doubt you’ll need any cover, as hot as it is, but just in case.” She laid the pillow at the head of the trundle, pulled back the top sheet, and folded the spread at the foot. “We should all get some rest. As late as it is, daybreak will come mighty early.”
Soon Emmy and Lily were both fast asleep, their slow, rhythmic breathing almost in sync with each other. But not Callie. She remained vigilant, resecuring the screen over the window and peering out to keep watch until she could no longer hold her eyes open. Hepsy would say this was one of those nights “when you got to do like Paul in the Bible—drop your anchors and pray for daylight.”
Callie would be praying that prayer—over and over until sunrise lit the sky and chased away the troubles that hide in the night.