BY
SARAH GAILEY
THET IS WAS A WILD thing washed up out of the wheat. Not the strangest gift to walk out of the field—no white bull was she—but strange enough. It was Cor Ellison’s field she wandered out of at dusk, looking all of five years old but with eyes that stared right through you like she’d been to war, and Cor took her in. He always took ownership of what came out of his wheat, whether what he took wanted to be an owned thing or not, and the girl was no exception.
Young Thetis was a barefooted, tangle-haired creature, howling at the moon and curling her lip up at mittens in the winter. She’d look out the window at the hills one morning and that night be gone, back a week later with mud in her eyebrows and a cape’s worth of rabbit pelts slung over one shoulder. When her baby teeth started falling out, she took to yanking the loose ones herself and tossing them into the hearth before they could fall out. She nearly cut her thumb off trying to free a wolf from a trap just off the edge of Cor’s property. Not a soul doubted her when she said it was the trap that got her and not the wolf. No one had ever heard of a wolf brave enough to bite Thetis.
Thetis wasn’t a domesticated creature, but she was curious about tameness, a fox nosing around a dog’s kennel. She watched close when people’s noses turned red and sniffly, and her eyes got catlike tracking the way folks stepped to avoid puddles. She felt fabric between the pads of her fingers and tasted anything anyone would offer her, and it was as if she’d never lived before, which it’s fair enough to say she hadn’t. For all that she tossed her neck at shoes and hairbrushes and handkerchiefs, she was fascinated, too, and folks said that Cor kept her knee-deep in pocket watches and pepper grinders just to keep her from running off back into the wheat for good. So long as she had something new and small and human to study, Thetis stuck close. She wandered plenty, but she always came back.
The problems started right on time. Thetis started to go from creature to girl, and it was a small town, and nearly everyone in it had eyes. She was never quite pretty, but she was something to notice even when she wasn’t walking into church with a fresh-trapped pheasant in her fist. There were cornfield whispers in the way she talked, and the tilt of her head was hawk-sharp. Once her legs sprouted up coltish, looking turned to staring and staring turned to talking, and people understood without having to say so that she was going to be a woman to watch out for sooner than later.
Uncle, who lived on the farm with Cor and Thetis, got her a dress to replace her poor abused overalls. It only took him a day and a half of shouting and door-slamming to convince her to wear it to church, which per Thetis’s usual habits was a formality of a fight. She was softened by the beauty of the thing, by the ribbons and layers of floating linen. She walked into the service in that dress looking almost like she’d taken to the bridle—but the prettiness of it was scarred by the leaves stuck to her feet, and by the barn owl that perched on her shoulder, his wicked talons drawing blood. She didn’t flinch at the owl’s grip.
Anyone who stared at Thetis that morning got watched right back by her and that owl just the same, and which pair of eyes was wilder no one could say.
* * *
The day came, as days come, when Thetis needed help Cor and Uncle couldn’t give. It was a long time coming by most standards, twelve years to the day since she’d walked out of the wheat. She knew well enough what was happening to her. She put her knuckles to Doc Martha’s front door, and handed over a bucket of good ripe figs in exchange for a conversation about the blood and the pain and what to do about it.
Thetis didn’t so much as flinch when Doc Martha fetched a basket of fresh eggs. She just lay down on the floor with her loose hair fanned out behind her shoulders, pulled her dress up over her ribs, and waited. Her bare toes curled on the floorboards as Doc Martha cracked the egg over her flat belly.
The yolk was double.
“You’re going to birth a boy someday,” Doc Martha said in a voice that didn’t have congratulations anywhere in it. “Tougher’n saddle leather, a fighter and a bruiser.” She pointed to a speck of blood on one of the yolks. “And a lover. That boy of yours’ll live long or he’ll live hard. You’ll be birthin’ a squaller, no two ways about it.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Thetis said, the whites of the egg running off her sides and dripping onto the floor. “No sons nor husband neither, thank you very kindly.” She said “thank you” like it was a new kind of fruit she was tasting, one she wasn’t sure was quite ripe.
“If you had a choice in the matter, I’d’ve said as much.” Doc Martha handed Thetis a rag to clean the egg off her belly and watched the way the yolks held strong for a long time before bursting under the linen. “He’ll be greater than his daddy, even. Stronger too, he’ll need to be stronger. And you’ll belong to that son until one of you is through,” she said.
“Won’t be a daddy to be greater than,” Thetis told her, and her eyes blazed as cold as the river. She walked out the door as if the conversation was through, and she spent half the afternoon in the woods, slapping branches out of her face and growling at rabbits. Her fury grew as the light on the horizon died, and by the time she got home, she was a thing made of pine sap and wrath—but by then, Cor and Uncle Ellison had gotten word from Doc Martha. They lived on the outskirts of town, but it was a small-enough town that even outskirts still heard rumors before the telling was finished. They were ready for her.
They fought like thunder, them saying she had best decide what kind of man she’d marry, her shouting back that she’d sooner walk into the corn without a ball of string to find her way back than do something as stupid and small and human as get married to a man. Every ear in town was turned to the sound of that fight—even the crickets held their legs apart to listen. It was a still-enough night that it was hard not to hear the way Thetis started losing ground.
They told her she was too old to keep running barefoot through the woods and swimming in the river the day the ice cracked. They told her she’d eaten enough of their food and spent enough nights under their roof that she was a woman now, bound by that prophecy just as much as she was bound by the humanity she’d grown into. Even as she slammed her way through that little house screaming that she wasn’t a woman and never would be, they told her it was time to grow up. Her voice began to soften with defeat as it became clear to her that they were right—for all her slamming, she couldn’t outright leave.
They said it was time to start braiding her hair and wearing shoes and thinking about who she’d aim to marry. Good Christians, were Cor and Uncle, but even so they couldn’t ignore Doc Martha’s prophecy, and they weren’t about to let Thetis ignore it either. They loved her, in their way, and so they told her to find some fellow who could manage her, someone good enough that her son being greater than him would be a boon instead of a burden. The only way out, they said, was through.
It was past midnight before the fight quieted, Thetis having shouted something about wearing the damn shoes just to shut those fool men up. The whole town heard it coming as clear as a hailstorm pounding across a fallow field, and they hunkered in to wait for the rooftops to start shaking.
Whether anyone liked it or not, Thetis was about to start courting.
* * *
By the time the sun came up, Moss Hetley was waiting on Cor Ellison’s porch with a fistful of thistles.
Moss was everything that a town like that one wanted a man to be. He had bull-broad shoulders, and his hands were mostly knuckle. He wasn’t mean enough to beat his dogs, but he wasn’t kind enough to bring them inside when it snowed, either. He was more civilized than Cor and Uncle; he wrote poetry, most of it about chopping wood, and at the start of every summer he bought new shoes for the children at church. He liked being the only one who could do an impossible thing, and he liked to feel like a hero to the town, and he was as stubborn as a headache—so of course he had his hard-set black eyes fixed on Thetis to wife.
When she went out to pump water in the morning, she didn’t notice him at first. Her hair was in a clumsy, half-knotted braid. She was trying to figure out how to walk in shoes, now that Cor and Uncle had made wearing them a condition of staying in their home. The way she tugged at the braid and stumbled in the shoes spoke to a choice she’d been outraged to have to make at all—she wanted to stay, so she was bending to the new rules, but she didn’t have it in her to pretend to be happy about it.
She stumbled over the doorframe and nearly toppled right into Moss. When she looked up at the great wall of a man standing on her porch with his thistles in his hand, her eyes caught on the shining chain of his pocket watch. She froze, hypnotized by the links of delicate silver. He reached out and touched her chin as sweetly as if she were made of crystal, and when his finger met her skin, fury swept over her like wind through tall grass. She walked past him with her nose pointing east and her hips pointing north, and when she came back lugging the bucket of water, he was right where she’d left him.
“What are you after?” she snapped, though she surely knew.
“I’d like to speak to Cor Ellison,” he rumbled. “Or Uncle, if Cor’s not in.”
Thetis slammed the door behind her and didn’t bother telling Cor or Uncle that Moss was waiting on them. When she came back out an hour later with a hatchet over her shoulder to check the traps, the thistles were lined up in a row on the porch rail. She knocked them off with the hatchet handle, then reached down and tore her new shoes off with a snarl. She threw them after the thistles and jumped down the porch steps, and she didn’t come back until the frogs by the river were singing down the dusk.
When she got home, the thistles were in a jar on the windowsill, and her shoes were waiting by the door. She picked them up with ginger fingers like they were foul things instead of fresh leather, and she walked inside on silent feet. Cor was whittling by the fire with long, thoughtful strokes of his good knife. Thetis dropped the shoes with a clatter, slapped the three fat quail she’d trapped onto the kitchen table. She glared at Cor, but he didn’t say a word until after she’d scalded the first of the birds.
“Uncle wanted to know if you need anything from the city,” he said to the hunk of wood in his hand. “He’s going into town to see about a suit and thought you might like a new dress for the harvest festival. Some dancing shoes.”
Normally, her eyes would have lit up. Whenever Uncle went to the city, Thetis asked for small soft things, scraps of silk and rag dolls. But the fight from the night before was still in her, too fresh for her to play the old game of gifts. “Don’t need a new dress. This one’s fine,” Thetis said in a level voice as she yanked feathers from the first quail, pulling hard enough to spatter blood across her apron. The cotton of her old dress was soft and stained; the skirt hem had been let out twice, and the sleeves ended at the elbows. It was well past a rag, but knowing Thetis, she’d patch it until it was more stitch than scrap. “And I don’t need shoes.”
Cor raised his eyebrows. “Watch you don’t tear the skin on those birds, now,” he said. Thetis frowned, not because he was correcting her but because he was right. The birds were small things, and she should have known how to handle them. She plucked gentler but with her jaw clenched tight. The only sound for a time was the scrape of Cor’s knife on pine and the soft pull of feathers from flesh, and the silence could almost pretend to be companionable.
Three days later, Uncle came home from the city and left a white box on Thetis’s bed. The dress inside was as red as the belly of a pomegranate, and the neckline dipped low enough to show the hollow of her throat, and she didn’t want to love the dress but of course she did. A wild thing was Thetis, but even wild things can covet, and she wanted to own the dress as bad as anyone wants to own something beautiful.
Under the dress was a pair of dyed-to-match shoes—little heels and gleaming buckles. She hated them even more than she loved the dress, but she knew that there was no wearing one without the other. She clutched the soft cotton of the dress to her throat. She stared at the way the light sparked off the buckles of the shoes, like the sun catching the teeth of a bear trap. For the first time in her life, she was afraid.
* * *
The harvest festival that year may as well have been renamed the Thetis festival. Everyone was mindful of the prophecy and the fight that came after it. Everyone had seen the way Thetis walked slower now that she wore shoes, and everyone knew that Moss was closing in on her like thunder after lightning. The boys in town all slicked their hair back and washed their necks and starched their collars, but it was more out of respect for Cor and Uncle than out of a sense of competition. No one much wanted to compete with Moss, and no one much wanted to face down Thetis’s contempt.
She came to the festival in her red dress and her red shoes, her hair braided up tight by Doc Martha’s unforgiving fingers. Everyone who asked her to dance did it with the kind of polite you’d show a flat-eared cat, and she said “No thank you” until the only person left standing near to her was Moss.
The firelight caught on the chain of his pocket watch. Thetis worked hard not to stare.
“Let’s dance, Thetis,” he said, holding out a hand like the deed was already done. She made to stalk off toward the corn, but he snatched her arm sparrow-quick. Even though everyone nearby was making a show of not staring, there wasn’t a breath that didn’t catch when he laid his hand on that girl. Thetis whipped around, her finger under Moss’s nose like a nocked arrow, and twisted up her lip to give him her opinion of his hand on her elbow. But before she could spit hell at him, he spun her in a wide circle. The fiddle players caught on before Thetis did. She stumbled, trying to keep her feet under her, and the music turned it into dancing.
There was no escaping, so she danced with Moss. Her smile was a rattling tail. Cor and Uncle watched with folded arms as she let the man lead her in one dance and then another. Uncle’s face was still; Cor’s was more than a little sad. It was three dances before anyone else was brave enough to join in the dancing. Thetis snarled like a mountain cat, but Moss held her tight and swung her high and dipped her low, and by the end of the night, the thing had been decided. Moss had held onto the unholdable girl.
The last song ended. Moss dug into his pocket, and from its depths he excavated a dull gold ring. It shone like an apple in the firelight. Thetis couldn’t hide her fascination with the thing—it was the smallest beautiful thing she’d yet seen. She stared at it, slump-shouldered and hollow-cheeked and wanting.
He didn’t drop to a knee, just held the ring out and waited. Thetis gave her hand over like a woman dreaming, her arm lifting slow, her eyes unblinking as she watched the light play over the gold. It wasn’t until Moss slid the thing onto her finger that she startled, but by then it was too late. The ring fit perfect, and everyone clapped while Moss pressed his lips to her cheek, and Thetis was well and truly trapped.
* * *
They were married before Christmas. Thetis wore a white dress from the city. White satin shoes, too, the third pair of shoes she’d ever worn in her life, and she didn’t stumble in them even once. It was a good wedding with good food and good music, and the bride didn’t look at the groom at all, not even when she made the vow.
She had never been one to waste time once she’d decided on a project, and so by the time the first fiddleheads were poking through the snow, her belly was soft and her face was round and everyone was whispering that the two-yolk son was on the way. She answered their congratulations with the same grim satisfaction she’d shown after slaughtering her first rooster. “Only way to get a kettle boiling’s by lightning a fire under it,” she’d say, looking at the ring on her finger with increasing distaste.
Neighbors gave her a rattle and a pair of impossibly small shoes and a long white christening gown and knitting needles and an embroidery kit. She was tired enough for the last half of the pregnancy that she learned to sit by the hearth and make use of the latter two. She sent Uncle to the city for thimbles and colored thread and kitten-soft yarn. She bared her teeth at Moss when he tried to press his ear to her navel to hear the baby’s heartbeat, and she still threw her shoes into the garden. But she also sewed buttons onto miniature shirts, and the fury in her frown gentled when she smoothed her fingers over the stitches.
She seemed so close to settled that it was almost a surprise that next January when Moss ran into town, wild-haired, chasing after his missing wife. He ran from the post office to the grocery to the barbershop, but it wasn’t until he got to the dentist’s that he found someone who had seen Thetis that day. The postman who was getting his bad tooth looked at said that he’d seen her. He’d almost forgotten about it, with the news about the war and the draft being all anyone wanted to talk about, but he’d seen her all right. She was walking into the wheat that morning, he said, both hands braced on the small of her back, her belly set out in front of her like the prow of a ship. He told Moss that he saw her walk into the field and thought nothing of it, that wheat being on Cor Ellison’s land and all.
“Was she wearing her shoes?” Moss asked, his fists in the postman’s shirtfront, and when the man shook his head Moss turned and ran. Everyone who’d seen him run into town saw him run out, faster than a hare with a hawk over his shoulder. He didn’t stop running until he reached the wheat.
But of course he was too late—by the time he got to the wheat, Thetis was staggering out of it with blood soaking her legs and a baby at her breast. She swept past Moss in her bare feet and her ruined skirt, walked up the steps of Cor and Uncle’s house, and let herself in. Moss followed her bloody footprints inside and found her sitting on Cor’s whittling stool by the hearth, her leather shoes in front of her and the baby asleep with her nipple still in his mouth. The room smelled like iron and clean sweat. Moss stood with his hands braced on the doorframe, and Thetis finally looked at him. Her gaze was flat and final; she had gotten what she needed from the man she’d allowed to marry her. She didn’t so much as blink as she slid her bloody feet into the shoes she hated.
They named the baby Esau, and with that they renamed her Esau’s Momma. She stopped being Thetis, when anyone talked about her—she had never been Moss’s Wife, but she was sure as hell Esau’s Momma. He was a strong boy with a swagger of red curls that nothing could settle. He had fists like his father and a holler like his mother, and Moss shone bright with pride.
Esau’s Momma was something different from proud. Her mouth tightened whenever someone called her by her new name. She didn’t look at her son with warmth, but she wasn’t quite cool, either. She stroked the newborn-down above his ears and studied his fast-growing fingernails. She watched him sleep, her eyes bright as a cat’s. She loved him the way a bear loves its trap-caught paw.
He needed her, and whether she liked it or not, she needed him right back.
* * *
The harvest festival that year, just a few months after she came out of the wheat field with a damp-headed Esau in her arms, marked two years since Moss made Thetis dance. She was wearing that same red dress, the one Moss had captured her in. The red shoes, too, the dancing ones, although Moss knew better than to ask her to dance. She kept Esau close in a sling made of white linen with orange blossoms embroidered along the edges in her wide, clumsy stitches. They stood by the bonfire drinking cider, a tidy family to look at them. Moss rested his hand on the small of her back. She shivered away like oil pearling on a hot pan.
Moss didn’t notice her shudder, of course, because he wasn’t looking at her. He was talking to somebody about the way the war would change the price of alfalfa and barley. Esau was craning his neck out of his sling, watching his daddy with the eyes of a child who’s just starting to recognize who his people are. He was watching the way Moss’s watch chain glinted in the flickering firelight, hypnotized in that way babies get.
Esau’s Momma was watching the fire.
Her shoulders were set, and anyone who’d been thinking or looking close enough could have seen what was coming, but nobody was watching Esau’s Momma because Moss had his hand on her back. His hand on her back might as well have been a latch on a storm door, as far as any of them were concerned. So they didn’t watch, and they didn’t see the way her fingers twitched at the edge of the baby’s sling.
The moment came when his hand left her back, and when it did, Esau’s Momma moved fast as a snakebite. She whipped the baby out of the sling, both his legs in one of her strong hands. She swung him toward the fire like she was aiming a horseshoe at a post, and she let go at the top of the arc and Esau flew—but Moss reached out and snatched the boy from the smoke before anyone could finish gasping.
“You’re the one’s always talking about the prophecy,” Esau’s Momma spat, firelight glinting off her teeth. “The prophecy says he needs to be strong. I’ll burn the weakness out of him; you see if I don’t.”
Moss held the squalling boy close, patting his back and frowning like this wasn’t the first time and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. “The prophecy says he can live long or he can live hard,” he said quietly. “You try this way to turn him into a man who’s strong, you and I both know which of those it’ll be.” His brows drew down into a pleading kind of frown. “He could live long. We could raise him up into a man who lives long.”
Esau’s Momma just stalked away into the night, the baby’s sling loose around her belly. She didn’t come back to the festival that night. Later that week the boy who milked cows for Barrow the dairy farmer was telling anyone who’d listen that he saw Esau’s Momma walk out of the cornfield at dawn, still wearing her dancing shoes. The next day, she was back in town with Esau in his orange blossom sling, buying butter for biscuits the same as ever, murmuring to the boy in a singsong voice about the shape of choosing. When she went to pay for the butter, the grocer asked if she’d donate a dollar to send cigarettes to the troops. Then he asked how the baby was coming up.
She nodded and laid a hand on Esau’s head. “He’s weak now,” she said, stroking his hair with her fingertips. “But he’s going to be strong.”
* * *
She finally got her way the day before the river finished freezing over. There was slush on the surface, but the water was still moving, cold as death and twice as fast. She left Cor and Uncle’s house, left them talking with Moss about the way the draft was picking up. She slipped away quiet, and she walked to the water with the boy asleep in her arms. Her steps were quick and sure even though she still hadn’t quite got the hang of those damned leather shoes. Moss and Cor and Uncle ran hard when they noticed she was gone, but they were far enough behind to have to shout after her, and she was faster than they could catch up to.
She didn’t look over her shoulder as the men ran at her. She just grabbed Esau by the ankle, and before he could so much as wake up crying, she’d flipped him upside down and dunked him. She could have let him go—he would have died all the same, him just being so many months old—but she held him tight, the skin of her hand turning white in the water. She stood with her feet rooted to the riverbank, and it wasn’t until Moss reached her that she finally pulled the baby out. He wasn’t quite blue, but he sure wasn’t pink, either, and he was still as a stone.
Cor and Uncle stumbled up behind Moss, panting hard, hands braced on their thighs, but Esau’s Momma didn’t spare them a glance. She shoved that baby into her dress next to her skin and whapped his back hard with a clenched fist, and he choked up water and caterwauled like he’d just learned what screaming was for, and for the first time in a little over two years, Esau’s Momma smiled.
“He’ll be good and strong,” she said. “That’s all the weakness washed away, near about. Good as I can get it, given what his daddy’s made of.” And with that, she walked right past those men who’d decided she would have that baby.
For weeks after, the boy had a purple ring around his ankle in the shape of her fingers. Folks liked to say that was the place the life stayed in Esau when his momma tried to kill him dead. Esau’s Momma took to ignoring her husband and watching her son, and some of her fury seemed to smooth down into patience. She had learned something new that day by the river, something small and human: she had learned to wait for what she wanted.
* * *
Esau was a scrapper on the schoolyard—half in the way kids are, half because every other child his age had heard about the prophecy, and about his momma drowning the weakness out of him. His eyes blacked and healed like the turning of the moon. It was all friendly enough, the way he and his friends tossed around playing soldiers, and if the occasional fight got hostile—well, Esau ended those fights. He hung onto the teeth that got knocked out against other kids’ knuckles, and his momma tossed them into the hearth, saying that if she didn’t, they’d wind up sown in the fallow field and an army would spring up tougher than any that had ever marched before. The boy was bold and brave and tougher than saddle leather, just like Doc Martha said he’d be. There was no weakness left anywhere in him.
Except that he was always bringing things home. Half-starved kittens abandoned in the alfalfa by their mothers, and ducks with their wings broken, and once a mountain cat with the broken bottom of a soda bottle stuck in her paw. It wasn’t quite a weakness, the way he brought things home. Just a fondness, and softer-hearted than his momma thought he’d turn out. She helped him mind the broken things he brought her, and she worked to make sure he grew up with the right kind of balance. Not too tender, but not so hard that he’d wind up the sort of broken man who stays home so he can feel bigger than the folks he bullies, either.
She let the kittens suckle on milk-soaked rags while she spun Esau stories of war and courage. She set the ducks’ wings and fed them corn, and she murmured to Esau about the way battle makes a man strong. She eased glass out of the growling mountain cat’s paw, occasionally running her fingers across the fur between the cat’s ears, and she taught the boy the meaning of glory.
She watched him as close as she had when he was new and small, and so she wasn’t surprised when sixteen-year-old Esau brought a bigger broken thing home. A boy from school by the name of Pistol, which wasn’t his Christian name but then Moss wasn’t Moss’s Christian name either and nobody gave him a second word about it. Esau and Pistol were stuck together close as two yolks in the same shell. Esau told his momma in a low voice that Pistol’s pa had come home from the war different, drunk and mean and broken, and could Pistol stay the night?
Esau’s Momma nodded in that quiet way she’d taken to, and she watched the way Esau rested a hand on Pistol’s shoulder, and she didn’t say a word when they walked out into the woods together that night. She just left the front door unlatched and turned down Esau’s bed, and the next morning she put an extra plate on the table.
It was only three days before Pistol’s pa showed up on Esau’s Momma’s doorstep, pounding on the pine with a clumsy fist. Esau’s Momma laid a hand on Moss’s shoulder, folded her napkin on the table, and answered the knock at the door. Pistol’s pa’s eyes were swimming, and he smelled like poison.
Esau’s Momma stood in the doorframe and listened to the liquor-brave man as he told her all of what he thought of her. And then she stepped out into the night, closing the door behind her, and Pistol’s pa didn’t say anything more.
The three men in the house finished their meal in the heavy kind of silence that wells up between people who are trying their best to listen for what might be happening just out of earshot. They cleared the supper things—Moss wiped down the scarred wood of the table, and Pistol took the scraps to the yard, and if he saw what was happening out there, he didn’t say. Esau scrubbed the plates and dried them and put them away. None of them dared breathe too loud. There wasn’t a sound to be heard outside of the men trying to be quiet.
Esau’s Momma didn’t come back into the house until Moss had settled by the hearth with his polishing rag and his watch chain. He stood as she walked in, but she offered no explanations as to where she had been or what she had been doing. She kissed Esau’s red hair, and she gave Pistol’s shoulder a squeeze. She sat on her stool near the fire, put a hand into her pocket, and tossed something into the hearth that clattered against the stone. She reached down to wipe something off the toe of her leather shoe. She smiled.
Then, Esau’s Momma picked up her sewing and began mending one of Moss’s old shirts. She announced that Pistol would be staying in Esau’s room from then on, and he’d better go on and get washed up for bed. Her tone did not invite argument, so they did as she said. The boys stayed up late that night in Esau’s bedroom. They whispered in the dark with their noses pressed together and their breath on each other’s lips, telling each other that those were surely pebbles she’d tossed into the fire. Surely pebbles, for the question of where she would have gotten a whole pocketful of teeth was a question the boys could not make themselves ask.
Esau’s Momma stayed up late, too, sewing buttons until the fire had died and the mending was done.
* * *
With three men around her dinner table—five if Cor and Uncle decided to visit, which they did every few nights—Esau’s Momma went even quieter than she’d been since the night Moss made her dance. No more than a few words a day out of her, and those always to voice a worry about the war that wouldn’t end. It was one of those wars that don’t seem to have an aim to them, and no one could quite remember what had caused the whole mess to start up anyhow. It was a thing for women to quietly worry about, and so Esau’s Momma did just that. She quietly worried.
But not too quietly.
She served up roasted grouse and mentioned that there weren’t enough brave soldiers leading the fight for the good of the nation, and then she sat back and let the men talk about what they’d do different if they were in charge. She spooned spring peas from a bowl onto five plates and fretted that they just didn’t make heroes like they’d used to, and then she went to the kitchen for fresh bread while Pistol and Esau argued about which of them would make a braver soldier. She butchered a chicken while Cor whittled into a scrap bucket beside her fireplace, and she whispered to Pistol about what a fine marksman he’d make, and didn’t they need boys like that in battle? And then she walked to the yard with fistfuls of bones to feed Moss’s dogs, and she didn’t bother to listen to what Pistol said next because she knew exactly what he was thinking.
It wasn’t a shock to Moss or Cor or Uncle when the boys came home one day with their hair short and new green duffels over their shoulders. Moss slapped each of them on the shoulder and said he was proud, and Uncle poured good brown whiskey, and Cor beamed, damp-eyed. When Esau’s Momma walked in from feeding the hens, she froze in the doorway, staring at the dog tags around Esau’s neck. She half reached for the shining tags, a smile spreading across her face, and when her fingers touched the metal she burst into half-hysterical laughter. Choking on the words, she shook her head and said she’d known the day would come when he’d leave her, but she hadn’t known it would come so soon. Even as tears began to stream down her cheeks, she laughed like she couldn’t stop.
Eventually, Moss convinced her to drink a measure of whiskey down, and her eyes drifted shut. They put a blanket over her, one she’d knitted from kitten-soft fur. She slept hard, with her hair braided and her shoes on and Esau’s old baby sling clutched in her fist. Every so often, she’d murmur in her sleep, but the only words the men could make out were “hero” and “freedom” and “mine.”
* * *
The telegram about Pistol came home not a year later. Esau’s Momma answered the door, her hands leaving flour streaks on her apron, and she listened to the news that Pistol had caught a bullet with his belly. Her eyes were dry as she took the telegram from the man on her doorstep. She left it on the foot of Esau’s bed, and then she went back into her kitchen to finish cutting the biscuits for that night’s supper.
She stacked every letter from Esau that came home over the next year on top of that telegram—some opened, some not. She nodded when folks in town told her how much they admired her son’s courage, when they told her how proud she must be to be Esau’s Momma. “What good that boy’s done you,” they’d say. “Settled you right on down.”
Esau’s Momma would nod, and she would finish buying milk or honey or bread or roses, and she would walk on home in her good leather shoes with her shoulders low and her teeth dug into the soft meat of her cheek. She would bake pies and split wood and scrub the floors, and she would wait.
* * *
Two years after Esau and Pistol went to war—a little more than a year since Pistol’s telegram came home—Moss came running into town, tearing through the shops like he hadn’t since the day his boy was born. Not a soul could tell him where Esau’s Momma was, and not a blessed one of them asked Moss why he was looking for her. They didn’t need to ask—the big man was clutching a crumpled piece of paper in one hand, and his eyes were full of the wild fury of a man who never learned how to cry. He ran into the post office and nearly knocked down Cor, who wasn’t young enough to get back up on his own anymore. Cor looked at his son-in-law’s eyes and at the telegram in his fist, and said the words no one had the courage to say.
“Have you checked the wheat?”
When the two men got to the wheat field, she was waiting for them, her fists full of thistles and her mouth curved like a cat’s claw. She wore her old red dress and her dancing shoes, and Moss and Cor noticed two things in the same moment. When they told each other the story later, over whiskey and in low voices, neither man could say which was more frightening: the barn owl digging its talons into her shoulder, or the fact that with that red dress on, they could see how she hadn’t aged a minute since the first night she wore it.
“Come home,” Moss said. “You gotta come home. It’s Esau.” He held out the telegram like it was a half-starved kitten she could nurse back to health.
“I know it’s Esau,” she said. Her voice was a pat of butter melting over fresh-cut bread. “Did they tell you he was a hero? He was surely a hero. Tell me about how he died a hero, Moss.” The barn owl fidgeted on her shoulder, and the dark red of the dress got a little darker where it held tight to her skin.
“Come on home, now,” Cor said. “You gotta help us make the arrangements. It’s only right.”
“Why is it only right?” she asked, and the curl of her smile sharpened.
“Well, it’s—it’s only right,” Moss stammered, looking down at the telegram in his hand. “You gotta help us lay him to rest.” When she didn’t answer, his shoulders dropped. “Please,” he whispered, and his hand rose slowly to his pocket.
Thetis’s eyes tracked the movement. Her smile faded as Moss withdrew his pocket watch. He held it out to her, the chain bright in the sunlight. He hadn’t let tarnish touch it, not since the day he’d stood on her front porch.
“Please,” he said again.
Thetis took a step forward. The men flinched at the sound of her heels digging into the soil. Her eyes glinted with old firelight. “I’ll come home,” she said, her voice as tense a warning as the crest of a cat’s spine. “But not for that. I’ve had enough gifts. I’ve had enough of made things.”
“What, then?” he asked, his voice cracking with the attempt at courage.
Only the thistles were between them, purple and bright, the barbed stems digging deep into the meat of Thetis’s palms. They couldn’t possibly have been the same thistles as the ones that Moss had brought to her so many years before, the gift he’d left on her front porch to declare his intention to trap her.
They couldn’t have been the same ones, and yet Moss’s eyes couldn’t find a difference between these and those.
“Eat them,” Thetis said. Cor started to speak, started to say that enough was enough, but Thetis silenced him with a raised index finger that carried the authority of a mother who has silenced her fair share of excuses from the mouths of children. “Eat them, and I’ll come home with you, Moss. Eat them, and I’ll bury that child for you. I’ll dig his grave with my own two hands.”
Moss took a single thistle from her, the first of the seven in her grip. He raised it to his mouth, looking at her as though he was waiting for her to laugh and say it had been a joke. Her face remained as still as a midwinter river.
The soft purple petals brushed the back of Moss’s tongue, and his teeth closed over the sharpest thorns on the thistle’s bud. He made a sound like the kind of dog he would have called it a mercy to shoot. Saliva began to well between his lips as he chewed, his jaw working once and then twice, slow and reluctant as a person forcing her feet into her first pair of shoes. His mouth went pink with a froth of blood and thistle-milk, and Thetis watched it run down his chin with the same bright interest she’d once brought to the sight of glass beads and copper pennies.
Moss managed to chew four times before he choked on blood and thorns, and with an urgent, visceral coiling of his throat and back, he failed. He spat and gagged and wept. Pulp and petals and blood-tipped barbs fell to the dirt at Thetis’s feet. Moss braced his hands on his knees, his breath coming ragged, his eyes desperate and darting.
“I can’t do it, Thetis,” he said. “Ask for something else.”
Thetis dropped the remaining six thistles between them.
She laid a finger on Moss’s chin, as sweetly as if it were made of crystal, and with terrible patience she lifted it until he was standing upright again. His face was flushed and wet, his shirt stained at the collar with the mess of his weakness. She waited until he was brave enough to look into her eyes. “The only wildness I’ve ever asked of you,” she said, tinting the words with a cruel measure of disappointment.
“Please,” he stammered, his words soft with pain as he tried to speak around the raw, bleeding thing that was his tongue. “You’re Esau’s Momma.”
“Esau’s Momma was a name you made me wear,” she said.
“Haven’t I been kind to you?” His voice carried the same pleading note that it had when he’d asked why Esau couldn’t turn into the kind of boy who would live long.
“Was any of this kindness?” She let his chin go, and she reached down to undo the buckle of one red shoe. “Was any of this for me?”
“You’re still his momma,” Cor growled, making as if to step in strong where Moss had shown himself soft. He went to take her elbow, but the owl turned its great eyes on him and he froze like a mouse running across the snow. He swallowed hard. She loosed the buckle of her other shoe and slid it off her foot. She stood with her bare feet in the earth, curled her toes into the loam.
“I don’t belong to that word anymore. Esau’s dead,” she repeated, the word dead sweet as a promise, and she laid her red dancing shoes on top of the paper in Cor’s hand. One shoe nearly fell, but he caught it before it hit the ground. “And Esau’s Momma is, too.”
And with that, Thetis returned to the field. She walked away from the men who’d caught her. For the rest of their days, they’d remember the sight of her: the soles of her feet pressing into the earth, the triumphant curve of her back, the set of her shoulders. She vanished into the wheat, and she left them behind with nothing more than a torn telegram, a pair of old dancing shoes, and a hearth full of teeth.