Years before Flynn and Briar snared a coachwhip in the belly of a rusted plane, Ivy and Ruby met in the churchyard. It was the white of winter, they were seven years old, and soon neither of them would remember it.
Ivy leaned against the downed trees at the bottom of the gas station’s hill. Her feet were buried in snow, and her thin coat shimmered crow-black against the ice. Ruby hiked toward her as snow swarmed her knees.
Ivy had seen Ruby in church before, though they hadn’t spoken. Their mothers weren’t friends, nor were they friendly. Their fathers hoisted serpents and spoke in tongues. They danced to the chime of a tambourine while a crowd of women watched in awe. The two men were opposite in likeness—Ruby’s father, Hasil, was gray-haired and slack-faced, while Ivy’s father was purple-necked and swollen—but they had one thing in common. Sunday was the only day either of them felt like a king.
Outside the gas station, Ruby crept close enough to see that Ivy was sitting on a pile of gloves. A dozen of them. Her hands were dahlia-red in the snow.
“You’re cold,” Ruby said.
Those winters taught girls in dresses what death would be like, the iced amnesia of skin forgetting how to feel. Ruby didn’t ask for a pair of gloves. Most mountain girls didn’t yet know how to warm themselves, didn’t find themselves to be worthy of much comfort.
Ivy didn’t want the gloves for her hands, either.
“I stole these,” she said. “From men’s pockets outside the Saw-Whet.”
Up the hill the preacher’s voice shuddered through the mountain quiet.
“Why?” Ruby asked.
Ivy didn’t answer. She had no reason, no need for one. She lined up the pile of mismatched gloves and tied them together, thumb to pinkie finger, like a wreath. Then she knotted it loosely around her neck, took out her daddy’s lighter, and set the wreath on fire. A ring of orange shot around her throat.
Ivy fell back into the snow, and the flame went to smoke before swirling into the sky. Fire to ice, black to white, one girl to another. Ruby lay beside her, and together they watched their breath escape.
That day Ruby witnessed Ivy’s burnt offering for a sin she had yet to commit. By the time Ivy burned at Ruby’s fire pit twenty-six years later, they’d barely remember the girls they’d once been—Ruby, the intrepid wanderer, and Ivy, who had crowned herself in fire.
After that morning in the churchyard, Ruby and Ivy’s friendship became a handprint they shared, twin life lines that began and ended as one. Old churchgoers like Hasil and Ivy’s father, Noble, used to have a name for this sort of union: a covenant, the kind that King David had with Jonathan in the Book of Samuel. They spoke of it as if men had invented the mystery of friendship, as if it hadn’t been the libation that sustained mountain women ever since water split rock to form the razorbacks above the hills.
There was no solemn vow between Ivy and Ruby, no promise, no pressing of bloodied palms together in the firelight. They didn’t need the boastful promises of men. The things they did for each other, they did in secret.
It started with Ivy, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday.
Twenty miles north of the Saw-Whet, Ivy’s A-framed cabin sat on a skein of dirt that fed off the mountain’s lone road. Her mother had been raised in that house, and her Grandmother Harper, too. They had no indoor plumbing, and it was Ivy’s job to shovel the shit. She spent most summer nights smoking her father’s Pall Malls behind the woodshed, and on the evening before her birthday, Ruby joined her.
Ruby had never left home after dark before. Hasil was the sort of father who punished his six daughters for things they hadn’t done—things that mostly had to do with the faults of men. He never hit his children. That was for unsaved hillbillies, he often said. Instead he told his girls lies about what would be true of them if they got caught with a boy after sundown, if they risked donning a dress cut above the knee. Ain’t nothing worse, he liked to warn, than a harlot leading a man to sin. One lash of his tongue stung twice as much as the lash of any whip, he reasoned, and the scar it left behind couldn’t be seen. Ruby tried to anticipate his corrections, doing her best to swerve away from them as if they were oncoming cars. Ivy, though—Ivy wanted to play chicken with her daddy and his puritan rules. Punish me? she baited him in her mind. I’d like to see you try.
But that night, in the swell of summer, Ruby helped her daddy get good and drunk before sneaking out to see her friend for her birthday. She’d witnessed her mother do the same, once a month for the past year, as a means of keeping herself from getting pregnant for the seventh time—a trick that hadn’t worked. Inside the cabin Ruby’s mother lay in bed in the dark, a cold cloth to her forehead and a spoiled bucket of vomit at her feet. Her nausea worsened with every new baby her body grew. Ruby slipped out the door, her shoes in one hand and her father’s latest jar of whiskey in the other. She left Hasil’s moonshine next to his favorite rocker on their porch, and then she waited in the weeds. Two hours after sundown, when he slogged up the hill after a day at the junkyard, he perked up at the sight of the jar and had himself a drink. Then another. After he slumped deep into the rocking chair and shut his eyes, Ruby flew to the mule path behind her house.
Ruby could make it to Ivy’s cabin in twenty-five minutes, if she ran. Beneath her arm she carried a poplin dress she’d sewn for Ivy with a small raspberry rosette stitched at the hip. The women of Ruby’s faith were called to wear long dresses, lest they tempt a man with their bodies. They wore gray and black, brown and tan. This was why Ruby had begun to sew as soon as she could hold a needle and thread: to be able to wear the colors of her mountain. Lilac and turquoise and peach and magenta—Ruby loved them all.
She’d gotten the fabric for Ivy’s dress in her home economics class, and she’d reworked an old McCall’s pattern into a style she’d seen Ivy eyeing in Seventeen magazine. The rest of her classmates had moved on to sewing pairs of oven mitts, while Ruby traded the pattern’s waistline pleats for darts, hand-stitched seashell scallops along the skirt’s hem. It had taken an entire semester of school to perfect.
Ruby knew that her friend would have no occasion to wear such a delicate dress. Still, she wanted Ivy to have something beautiful stowed in her closet. Ivy kept it for the rest of her life, never wore it again after her seventeenth birthday had ended. The dress would be among the first of Ivy’s possessions that Ruby would burn on the night she died.
Ivy was waiting at the woodshed when Ruby arrived, the smoke from her cigarette like a mist settling over the firewood. The friends crouched in the stiltgrass, said nothing, so they wouldn’t wake someone inside the house. When Ruby presented her gift, Ivy hugged her tight.
Then Ivy stripped in the moonlight. The dress slipped over her shoulders, and Ruby zipped up the back. Ivy twirled, laughed at herself. The skirt flashed in the shadows.
“I have something for you, too,” Ivy whispered.
She handed Ruby a switchblade with a pearlescent handle, and Ruby fastened it to the belt loop on her skirt. The gift made her smile, made her blush. She’d never owned such a graceful weapon. Ivy had chosen the knife at last summer’s flea market because it was sleek enough to hide, unique enough to be worthy of her friend.
Up the hill the dry growl of an engine turning over cut through the stillness. Together Ivy and Ruby watched Flynn Sherrod and his father steal away from their own cabin across the road to make whiskey after dark. As the headlights of Sherrod’s Chevy threw golden daggers into the night, Ivy ached to slip into their truck and hide herself among their carboys of moonshine.
Getting drunk didn’t bait her, but ruling the hills like a mountain man did. Ivy longed for the kind of escape a man like Sherrod would never need. She wanted to get wherever he headed with his son, to reach beyond the crater of rotted wood her father pissed in behind their cabin, which meant getting anywhere at all.
Ivy loathed her life on the mountain, even though it was the life she and Ruby shared. Guilt nagged at her for wanting something more than her friend could give. Ivy hated the lime her father spread in their outhouse to stanch the smell, the scabbed chicken in their coop that ate its own eggs, the pair of brothers she had who fought more than they slept. She wanted sidewalks, curbs, and strangers—each a wonder she’d have forsaken a treasure for, if she’d had one to give away.
Ruby stayed with Ivy until Noble returned home from a night at Teddy’s. His truck eased into their gravel patch before he spilled out of it and headed for the house. The kitchen light flicked on, then off. The house settled, and Ivy exhaled. Ruby kissed her on the cheek, wished her happy birthday, and disappeared into the shadows.
Ivy crept through the cabin’s back door and found Noble leaning against the cool of the woodstove in the dark, his feet spread-eagled on either side of it. He hoisted a cast-iron pan in the air and then he let it drop. It clattered against the floor. He’d done this before, waiting for her just inside the house without so much as a candle lit. Noble liked to startle his daughter as a teaching method, one meant to scare her straight—even when she’d done nothing wrong.
That night Ivy’s daddy put his hands loosely around her neck. His thumbs grazed her chin as he kissed her mouth, lost his balance. He was whiskey-drunk and sloppy, and his tongue swam down her throat like a trout.
“Mountain men are all the same,” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Sooner you learn that, the better.”
Then he staggered and fell on his daughter. Ivy kicked and clawed at him until he passed out by the woodstove. Barely a breath left in her, she slithered her body out from under his. Noble, big as a bear, could not be moved. Ivy lit a match, tossed it in the stove, and waited for it to scorch. She imagined shoving her father’s forehead against the belly of the piping iron until he woke up with a fist-size blister on his face. Ivy would make sure tonight was the last time Noble dared come near her.
Then she heard Ruby’s voice calling her name.
“Ivy,” Ruby said.
Ivy jolted at the brush of Ruby’s hand on her shoulder. She must have returned after the cast-iron pan sent a clang into the woods, slipped through the porch’s screen door without making a sound.
“What did you see?” Ivy asked.
“Enough.”
Ivy looked away, caught the beads of sweat on her father’s brow. She had no need to feel ashamed in her best friend’s presence, but she did. Noble had punished his daughter for her beauty, her curiosity, her spirit. The things she loved most about herself, he meant to destroy. He had a good chance of succeeding if she didn’t destroy him first.
“I think you got two choices.” Ruby’s voice was softer than the whisper of the creek in the distance. “We got two choices, really.”
Ivy fingered the black arrowhead she kept on a chain around her neck. Its point scraped against the flesh of her thumb.
“We either kill him or we leave,” Ruby said. “There ain’t no in-between.”
Ivy didn’t hesitate. “We leave.”
She couldn’t bring herself to use the word “escape.” They’d never said the word aloud to each other, the promise of it too holy to be real. But Ivy aimed to be known for the things she did rather than the things done to her.
“All right,” Ruby said. “It’ll take some time to plan, but we’ll leave.”
Ivy nodded, and Ruby swept out into the night. Then Ivy couldn’t help herself: She pressed her foot into Noble’s skull just enough for his cheek to rest against the hot stove, held it there until he quivered and fell back asleep.
Ivy spent the night watching her father from the kitchen corner. His freshly laundered long johns swayed like ghosts from their hangers by the open windows. She could suffocate him in five minutes with nothing but the tail of her skirt. She wanted to, if only to feel her own strength pulsing through her palms. But the thrill of it would be empty if he never knew what she’d done. That she’d won and he’d lost. Ivy wanted him to live until age turned him frail, knowing she’d left him behind.
When Noble stirred the next morning, Ivy’s Grandmother Harper appeared and nudged his jaw with her foot.
“Women give this mountain its splendor,” Harper said to Ivy. “And they get nothing in return.”
Noble’s mouth hung open. Above him a paltry collection of tiny spoons dangled in a wooden cabinet, a delicate, silvery hook for every state Ivy’s mother had visited. They numbered three. Noble slammed the pocked flooring with his fist as he came to, and the spoons shook. Harper poured a pitcher of water on his head, then reached for his bottle of rotgut on the table. Took a swig.
“A temper is good,” she said to Ivy as Noble’s spit pooled on the floor. “But a plan is better.”
Ivy’s mother rushed in then, cradled her husband’s head in her lap, and went about soothing his burn with a cloth and some salve. This was the true original sin, Ivy swore. A man always had a woman to clean up his mess. Ivy wished she could keep her temper. At least a temper would flare and die. What had replaced it was disquiet, everlasting. Ivy promised herself that day she’d never clean up a man’s mess. Instead she’d make a mess of her own.
Harper gestured toward the porch. “Come sit with me.”
Ivy joined her grandmother in the pair of rockers that overlooked the swirls of gravel in their front yard. The two of them often sat together, just so, while Harper regaled Ivy with stories of their mountain. Now that Ivy had turned seventeen, her grandmother told her it was time she learned about the kind of cunning she’d need to survive.
No legal record of it existed, Harper began, but coal miners’ wives had been forced to use sex as a shield since the 1930s, when mining companies had yet to purge the hills of ore, and coal barons thought they owned the right to all the land’s riches—including the women. An Esau Agreement, Harper called it.
“The law around here denies it ever happened,” she said from her rocking chair, twining a thread of waist-length, heathery hair around her finger. “Someone ought to know the price we paid.”
Back then, if a miner fell ill or broke a limb and couldn’t report to work, his wife was permitted to earn scrips to the company store in his stead. The agreement had the appearance of kindness, but the catch was deadly. A mining wife earned scrips for food and clothing by sleeping with her husband’s boss—or bosses, in Harper’s case. A woman who wore trousers and preferred three daily meals of tobacco rather than food, Harper had stepped into the agreement, wide-eyed and daring.
“None of those limp-dicked cowards could look me in the eye,” she said. “Not one.”
Often the agreement took place in the company store’s dressing room while a woman tried on an item of clothing. Some of them were prepared, and some weren’t. When Ivy asked why local police hadn’t put a stop to it, Harper laughed.
“The law around here don’t do shit for women,” she said. “You know that.”
The term “Esau Agreement” came from the Old Testament, Ivy’s grandmother explained. Esau, Isaac’s beloved firstborn, had returned from hunting so famished that he sold his birthright to his younger brother, Jacob, in exchange for a bowl of stew. Harper had sneered her lip at the name.
“Esau was so desperate it made him stupid,” she said. “Just another man, prisoner to his own appetites.”
Sooner or later, Ivy’s grandmother warned, a woman would do what she must for the ones she loved, and she ought to find no shame in it.
After that night Ivy and Ruby plotted their escape each time they were alone. Once they saved enough cash, they’d dump their fathers’ bottles of whiskey and disappear without a note. They’d catch a bus to Morgantown, where Ivy would learn to tend bar and Ruby would find a job keeping books. No one would gawk at them as strange statues of an even stranger faith, the way they did in Trap. The friends would work, they’d keep their own money. They’d forget about shitting outside in winter and bartering for penicillin in the cracked lot of the Saw-Whet. They’d buy themselves denim and rhinestones and drugstore perfume, all the wondrous things forbidden to them by the religion of their fathers. Ruby and Ivy vowed it would be the gift they’d give each other for high school graduation, and Ivy had even begun to pack her sweaters.
Then Briar Bird fought a lightning bolt and won.
The saddest truth about Ruby: She believed that miracles happened only to men.
Their whole mountain purred with the story of Briar’s boldness. No one mentioned the mudslides that had leveled most of the houses on the eastern edge of the hills, or that Ivy’s own father had disappeared since the night lightning struck. He’d been gone for almost three days, and no one at the mine had seen or heard from him. Noble had skipped town before, as men were sometimes prone to do. All that was nothing compared to Briar’s miracle.
Ivy had never seen her friend so flushed or fainthearted.
She’d never thought much of Briar, the dreamy-eyed logger’s son who’d rather charm a snake than a girl. His mama had been hotfooting around the mountain to spread a brewing redneck legend, the new gospel of a boy called White Eye.
Ivy pitied Briar for such a stupid tale. He’d forever be known as the boy who got hit by lightning, like the girls down in Trap were known for what farmers’ sons did to them in horse stalls when school let out in June.
Ivy and Ruby had been told the same bedtime story by their mothers since they were young: Bold girls become loose girls, and loose girls get broken. Ivy could see no other future if they remained. Even church girls as innocent as Ruby ended up nursing four babies and a husband. If the measure of a man lay in the deeds he’d done, then women paid from their own empty pockets. Ruby had paid a fortune to her scamp of a father. What other way could Hasil Day starve his daughter that he hadn’t already done? He drank all he earned, and he earned next to nothing. Ruby and her younger sisters had to hunt wild ginseng and sell it at the 4-H fair so they could keep potatoes and carrots in the cellar. Ruby also subjected herself to crimson welts from Old Lady Frye’s chestnut cane because she earned an extra ten dollars a month by clearing dead chickens out of her coop. If she missed a feather or two, Frye’s cane struck. Hasil had taken Ruby’s health, her heart, and her pride, and all he’d do when she turned eighteen was surrender them to her husband—unless she and Ivy left, and left soon.
But now Ivy felt Ruby slipping away from her, even as they whispered to each other under the gas station’s weeper on Sunday mornings. When Ruby got poison ivy after a night at the creek with Flynn—a fool’s error that proved she’d lost her sense—Ivy went to Ruby’s cabin to remind her friend of the promise she’d made to leave the mountain behind.
As she stepped through the front door, she bit back the laugh in her throat. It looked like Snow White had bustled through with her broom and left a shiny quart of apples perched on the table. Gone was the trash of Hasil’s daily toils. No spindles of pilfered copper sat stacked in the fireplace. The spew of old tires in the backyard had been rolled into the woods. The hundreds of keys without locks that once littered the floor had been collected in a tin can. Today Hasil had cleaned up after himself, and it wasn’t for Ivy’s sake.
Briar, the storm wrangler, had come to visit. He was seated at Ruby’s bedside, that tale of lightning girdling his blond head like a crown. Ivy watched them from the doorway.
Ruby had never looked ugly before. Poison ivy sores pitted her face, her lips chapped as a boar’s hide. Even her mama couldn’t look at her, but Briar drank her in. His blue eye slid into her while that white eye vaulted to the sky.
Goose bumps sailed across Ivy’s arms, and she laughed at herself. Briar had been credited as the mountain’s miracle worker, but Ivy had never wasted her time on stories of magic. Then Briar went about proving her wrong. He cupped his mama’s mintweed lotion into his hands and spread it over Ruby’s screaming skin. His palms swept across her like a swallow skimming the morning creek. Then he blew on her neck, a soft breath so gentle that Ruby moaned and opened her eyes. A chill scuttled across the room, even though the sun pressed in through the open window. And Ivy—despite herself—swore she felt a spike of ice hit the base of her spine. She shivered.
When Briar left, Ivy took his place at Ruby’s side. Ruby turned toward her, her face aglow.
“Your daddy.” Ruby’s voice, a scratch. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe more than one miracle happened that night the lightning came. Maybe Noble’s gone for good.”
Ivy’s stomach curdled. “And now we don’t have to leave. Is that it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I can see it all over you.”
That unspoken word—“escape”—hung between them again, dangling like a dead fish on a hook. Ruby caught the despair in her friend’s voice, sought to calm it.
“I’ve finally let go of the breath I’ve been holding all my life.” She sighed, raptured. “I never knew.”
“Never knew what?” Ivy asked.
“I never knew how much I’ve been longing to be touched by someone. Felt. Ain’t you been hungry for that, too?”
Ivy couldn’t answer. What Ruby spoke of seemed too precious to be real. She didn’t know that the worst thing about a man wasn’t his malice. It was his kindness, which he used in order to get what he wanted. Briar, Ivy knew, was about to take everything Ruby had—every last, good thing.
“It’s better than leaving, Ivy,” Ruby said. “It’s peace.”
Ivy released a laugh, dry and floundering.
“You don’t have to tell me that sounds crazy.” Ruby watched Briar follow the dirt path from her window. “I know it does. But I don’t care.”
Ivy hadn’t laughed because she found it funny. She hadn’t even laughed because it was sad. She laughed because for the first time since she’d grown, she was scared.
It didn’t take long for Ruby and Briar’s love story to settle in Ivy’s chest like a summer sickness. She wilted as Briar’s grandeur swelled alongside the August heat. In six weeks her best friend would be married, and Briar’s engagement to Ruby marked the first of a hundred tiny losses. While Ruby dreamed of white dresses, Ivy fumed. Ruby’s romantic heart had failed her, and Ivy determined she’d do something about it.
The day Briar proposed to Ruby, Ivy slipped to the Saw-Whet in the back of her daddy’s truck. He’d returned after three days away, and no one demanded an explanation. Noble hightailed it down the mountain to waste the evening playing euchre at Teddy’s Tavern, and Ivy hid herself beneath a tarp next to the pickax he used to chisel ore from strip mines.
She loved going to town. In the past the parking lot between the tavern and the motel had been a good friend to Ivy while she waited out her father’s rounds of cards. It gave her a smattering of pocket change, a weekly crop of strangers for Ivy to fool into buying her a Popsicle at the Shop ’n Save while she filched extra cash from their wallets.
That day Ivy wanted to abandon the thought of Ruby as a young and troubled mountain wife. Instead she met the man who would turn her into one.
Ricky Reynolds found her on her hands and knees in the Saw-Whet’s back lot, where the loggers liked to trade opioids in the ironweed. Sometimes they’d spill a dollar here, a nickel there. Ivy had her fingers on a quarter when a body sidled up behind her.
“Just how I like to see a woman,” a voice said. “On her knees.”
“Spoken like a boy,” Ivy said as she stood to face him, “who ain’t got what it takes to be a man.”
Ricky tried to laugh, his body fragile like a tomcat’s caught in a squall. He’d spoken words that belonged to someone else, a brute who had taught him that the best way to lasso a woman was to put her down. Long and lean, Ricky slouched as his dark hair fought against the wind. A cloud of smoke from a lit Marlboro plumed his head.
“What are you doing here?” Ivy asked.
“Scouting streams for fish,” he answered.
“Why ain’t you?”
“Just about to start, once I find my way.” Ricky looked forlorn and aimless, and it gave Ivy a thrilling kind of pity for him.
She smiled. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said as she turned slowly toward the mountain. She knew how fine her profile looked in the late-afternoon sun.
“Come fishing with me.” His hand grazed the nook of her wrist before he pulled it away. “To hunt for streams.”
“Is that a command or a request?” she asked.
“Your choice.” Ricky crossed his arms to hide the stains beneath his armpits.
“You ain’t from around here.” Ivy slid the quarter into her pocket and stepped toward him. “You don’t know nothing about fishing holes.”
“So show me.”
Ivy relished this moment with every man she met. The tides between them would rear until he found himself at her mercy.
“Tell the truth,” she said. “Fishing ain’t really what you want to do with me, is it?”
“No, it ain’t,” he said, all red-faced and hopeful. Ivy knew then that she had him.
He took her to his motel room, and she commanded the clothes off his body. He lay flat on his back, palms upturned as if he had something to offer. Ivy hitched up her dress and rode him hard. It gave her no pleasure. She stared straight into his eyes as he dug deep, clutched her hips, and cried out. Her lip snarled as he came, and she didn’t blink, not once. If there was one truth the men Ivy had been with knew, whether they’d spent one night together or a hundred, it was this: She would not be forgotten.
Ricky was scared, he was kept, he was fervent, he was spent. And something else—he was older than he should have been. Ivy hadn’t turned eighteen yet. Ricky was twenty-four, and no lawman or daddy in their hills would stand for it if they knew. But Ivy was no victim. She pitied any foolish boy who thought he could run away with her heart.
“Marry me. Please,” Ricky said as he panted.
“No,” she said. She would not let him kiss her mouth.
It wasn’t about love. It was about power. And Ivy had just gotten some.
The night before Ruby’s wedding, Ivy floated townward in the back of her father’s truck for the last time. Twilight had hit the woods, and not half a mile away Ruby stomped up the hill to insist that Flynn come to her wedding.
Don’t bother, Ivy had told her earlier that afternoon. He ain’t gonna come.
She rode toward Trap with her back arched against the truck’s wheel well and her arrowhead necklace clutched to her chest. Made from black flint, the arrowhead had a mossy patina and hung from a gray chain.
A pretty little necklace for a pretty little thing, according to the squat logger who had sold it to her along the broad side of the Saw-Whet. Ivy relished the look of it hanging just above her breastbone, sharp and slight. Her father had laughed when he caught sight of it around her neck.
“That’s nothing but a trinket. Who you think you’ll hurt with that?” he asked as he heaved his steel-toed boots to the floor, and Ivy thought of only one word in response.
You.
With or without a weapon, Ivy knew to fend for herself. Mountain men had done her no favors. She had no need for a knight in a Carhartt jacket. Instead Ivy wanted a phantom.
She found one that sweltering night, cruising through the parking lot that split the Saw-Whet and Teddy’s. His devil’s silhouette cut into the dashboard of his truck. A green-eyed city boy with auburn hair, Lovett Quick had the kind of name Ivy dreamed of while she slept. Love her quick, love her hard.
Make no mistake—Ivy knew he was trouble. She’d seen Lovett seep out of room 4B after her father disappeared into Teddy’s for his card game. Noble wouldn’t stagger out until last call at two a.m., which gave Ivy hours to find some entertainment of her own.
Ivy licked her lips. Naive city boy was a male breed she had yet to try. A mountaineer would never dress like a cowboy, and this boy didn’t know the difference. Lovett’s brisk Stetson saluted, his new Wranglers stiffened, his checked flannel went soggy in the heat. Lovett had stumbled into Trap from elsewhere, the very place Ivy longed to go.
“Hey, girl,” Lovett called to her from the side of his truck.
“The name’s Ivy,” she answered, resting her hands on her hips. “Ain’t you got any manners?”
Lovett whistled, and Ivy pretended not to hear. She let him smile first, introduce himself. When he did, she strutted up to the Silverado’s window, lifted the cigarette from Lovett’s fingers, and took a slow drag.
Lovett Quick had eyelashes for days. He stroked the side of his door, and Ivy ran a finger against the truck’s shiny white paint. She felt not one speck of dust. Here sat a man, she thought, who knew how to care for what he loved.
“Hey.” She took another pull from the cigarette and slid it back into Lovett’s hand. The Silverado throbbed in the heat. “You think you could give a girl a ride?”
A girl: what Ivy knew to become when asking for what she wanted.
“Depends,” Lovett said. His voice sounded feathery and sick, like the dirge Harper liked to play on her fiddle.
“On?”
“Where you want to go.”
Anywhere, she thought. Anywhere but here.
Ivy lusted after no man the way she lusted after a chance to escape. Ruby couldn’t see the noose she was tying around both their necks. Ivy knew of only one remedy to cure such an illusion, and it was pain. That was another lesson her grandmother had taught her. Suffering is the only friend you’ve got, Harper had said. Because it don’t lie.
Ivy knew then what she wanted from Lovett. She wanted him to find Ruby on that forsaken road that led to the razorbacks. She wanted him to slow down just enough so Ruby could see Ivy coming, standing brazen in the back of a quicksilver truck. She wanted Ruby to hear her laugh flying in the sky as she sped up the mountain and left her behind.
Ruby was about to make the worst decision of her life by marrying Briar, and Ivy wanted her to buckle beneath its burden. She wanted Ruby to taste, and envy, that Ivy was free.
“Drive past my friend who’s walking the hidden mountain road,” Ivy told Lovett. Ruby was bound to be whipping down the hill by now, reckless and untamed after talking to Flynn. “So she can see us riding high.”
Lovett considered it.
His teeth clenched his cigarette. “She pretty?”
Ivy stared him down and did not answer.
He ashed the flame and sighed. “Long haul up there,” he said, “and I don’t know my way.”
“I’ll show you, if you can keep up.”
Lovett laughed, tossed the cigarette to the asphalt. It flared orange before it choked.
“Get in the back,” he said.
From the minute Ivy climbed into the back of Lovett Quick’s Silverado, she knew she’d made a mistake. The moon hung like a scythe in the sky, the deadly kind of pretty that Ivy once loved best. Pretty kills, Harper liked to say. Or pretty gets killed.
Ivy set Lovett on a secret path up the mountain toward the razorbacks. Those mountains, sprawling upward like stone geysers, spiked above the trees in the distance. Over them the night brimmed with fireflies. Outsiders had never been welcome this far north, but Ivy cared nothing for tradition. She’d pay any price to see it rust. Already the night felt rare as the sun fell away, the moon no wider than a blade.
Ivy thought it would feel fast and fatal to ride in the bed of a stranger’s truck as the wind whipped her hair. Instead she felt a quiet panic nest in her throat. Her hills felt chilled now, distant. As Lovett fought the elbow turns and his truck pitched up the mountain, Ivy tried to settle into the cool steel of the truck’s frame and watch the stars blur above her.
To her left Ivy spied what she couldn’t have seen if Lovett had invited her to ride in the Silverado’s passenger seat.
A tackle box.
Most mountain men carried tackle boxes in their trucks, but Lovett’s was a museum. When Ivy lifted the lid, she found a different kind of ornament in each compartment. The first held mismatched earrings—pearls and gold hoops. The next housed twinkling bracelets. The third had platinum necklace pendants, an opal ring. Like someone trapping butterflies in jars, Lovett was out to collect pretty things.
In the back of Lovett’s truck, Ivy clung to her necklace. She knew she was in trouble, and so was Ruby. For the first time in her life, Ivy wished she’d never dared to dream of what lay beyond her mountain.
The Silverado was still two miles off from Ruby’s path when Ivy decided to act. As the truck slowed around a stiff turn, Ivy leaped over the side. Lovett screeched to a stop, and Ivy sprinted to the white ash trees at the edge of the woods. She heard Lovett jump out and slam the door. Then she skidded into the brush. Close behind her, Lovett wrapped his arms around Ivy’s waist and jerked her toward his chest.
“It ain’t got to be like this,” he said.
But it did. His muscles heaved against her back, and Ivy prepared herself. The longer she could stall him, the better Ruby’s chances of reaching home. Ivy tore her arrowhead from its chain and thrust it behind her. The arrowhead sank into Lovett’s right earlobe, slicing it in two.
Blood spilled down his neck. Lovett howled, wrestled Ivy’s arrowhead away. Tossed it into the trees. Then he took her by the wrists. Ivy wasn’t a praying woman, but she prayed then. Please, God. Let him leave me in the woods.
The saddest mercy of Ivy’s life: God listened. Lovett left her in the roadside ditch. The Silverado’s engine rumbled. The sound withered away as the truck headed north. Ivy felt relief, she felt panic. She was safe, for the moment, but Ruby was not.
A few minutes later, a car approached. Ivy lay flat, prayed for a stranger who wouldn’t see the fresh skid marks the Silverado had left behind. She once prided herself on her ability to conquer, but this she couldn’t win. If Lovett had returned, there would be hell to pay tonight. If someone else found her, there would be hell to pay tomorrow once Noble discovered she’d been out after dark.
The motor hummed, then cut.
Lovett had come back for her—she could feel it. Ivy tried to scream, but no sound came out. She couldn’t see the man who lifted her beneath the armpits and slid her out of the dirt. They reached an Impala, and the man threw Ivy into the passenger seat and sped down the mountain without his headlights. The spare moonlight caught his silhouette, frail and mussed.
Ricky’s profile appeared. He cast a glance at her, then kept his eyes to the road. Once he caught the dull glow of Trap’s city lights, Ivy started to shout.
“Turn back!” she yelled. “Ruby’s up there.”
But Ricky would not. He parked the car at the motel.
“I ain’t no hero,” he said.
Ivy slapped him. She’d never been so relieved to be rescued, and she’d never forgive him for it, either.
“You were following me,” she said, her voice gone hoarse.
“You’re lucky I was.” Ricky tried to touch her cheek but then thought better of it.
“You have to go back.”
“I’ll call the police,” he offered.
Ivy shook her head. It would take close to an hour for police cruisers to arrive from the county seat, and once they did, they’d notify Ruby’s father. If Hasil Day knew that his daughter had left the house, he would humiliate her in front of the whole mountain.
While Ricky returned to his motel room, Ivy paced through the Saw-Whet’s barren lot. Her father was still playing his rounds of euchre at Teddy’s, and would be for another two hours. Never had Ivy been so ransacked with dread. She wanted to scream until she woke the town.
Eventually, Ivy knew, what rose up the mountain would fall back down again. Lovett would return to Trap, and then Lovett would leave. He had no reason to stay, and Ivy didn’t care to watch him go. Revenge hadn’t crossed her mind. For now Ivy longed only to reach Ruby’s side. She wished she’d never left it. So she did what she had always done, the one thing she knew she could—she climbed into the bed of her father’s truck and hid beneath the tarp. An hour and a half later, her father floundered out of the bar and fishtailed his truck up the mountain’s crooked road.
When Noble slowed for a swift turn not five yardsticks from Ruby’s dirt trail, Ivy held her breath, closed her eyes, and hefted herself once more into the ditch.
She raced to Ruby. Early yet, the day still held shades of blue. Overnight Ivy had grown into a kind of mountain woman she’d not yet seen, the kind with enough fast-hearted fury to outrun the morning. Stiltgrass swarmed her thighs as she paced her sprint. Just a little farther now, Ivy whispered to herself. Just a little more. Her body ached to see her friend.
The morning’s ground clouds gathered thick enough to keep the sun from waking Ruby’s father, but Ivy took no chances. She crept through the moat of holly around the cabin’s perimeter to reach Ruby’s bedroom window in the back. She tapped on the glass, and Ruby’s face appeared, bracketed with blood. Flooded with relief, Ivy remembered that it was Ruby’s wedding day.
“How did you know?” Ruby could barely speak as she lifted the windowpane. A bruise marred the skin just above her collarbones.
“Shh,” Ivy said after she climbed inside, taking a cloth from the nightstand and touching it to Ruby’s face. “Your sisters will hear.”
Ruby’s bedroom was crammed with three bunk beds for seven sisters, and Ruby and Ivy had no space to speak. The pair squeezed into the closet and sat knee to knee with their backs against the wall. Above them Ruby’s wedding dress hung from a steel pipe—six yards of white muslin. On the back wall, she’d also taped up pictures she’d cut out of Ivy’s stash of Seventeen magazines—photos of dresses and crop tops, plaited bracelets and headbands—all the things Ivy had admired and Ruby hoped to make for her. An old quilt covered a cavity in the floor.
“Ivy,” Ruby said in the dark. “A man found me.”
She didn’t need to say any more. Ruby and Ivy had heard this kind of parable as a sober ushering into their girlhood, a story imparted to them by their fathers. A hard dick knows no conscience, Hasil had warned Ruby on her thirteenth birthday, in lieu of a gift.
“I never wanted a story like this.” Ruby’s voice cracked.
Ivy had no answer.
“You know what the worst part is?” Ruby rested her chin on the scab of her knee. “My daddy was right. Nothing good happens to a girl after midnight.”
Ivy didn’t ask what had happened. She didn’t ask if Ruby was all right. She asked only one question—how Ruby had gotten away.
The Silverado had run her off the road, and the driver threw open the truck’s door. It hit Ruby in the head before she fell into the ditch. She stumbled, too dizzy to stand. The man left the truck and crouched over her. Ruby reached for her knife, and he sank his knee into the soft skin above her heart as he wrestled it away and tossed it into the truck bed. His earlobe was sliced in two.
Ruby didn’t know how long it was before the headlights of an oncoming car lit up the pines in the distance. The man hid in the shadow of his truck, and Ruby ran.
She could have flagged down the car and asked for help. But Ruby knew the driver would take her home to her father, and she knew what he would have said:
Only one kind of girl is out this late at night.
It was an impossible choice—to die this one death or to die a thousand new ways every time her father looked at her. Ruby wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
The closet air hung heavy in the quiet. With this, Ruby resigned herself to silence. Ivy should have spoken then, told Ruby she’d led Lovett to her. She opened her mouth, but the words would not come out.
Before that night in the Silverado, Ivy believed that the truth wasn’t hard to tell. It was harder to live a lie, and a lie was all that the women on her mountain knew—how to submit to their husbands and swallow their vomit and serve a second piece of pie on Sunday afternoons. She swore she’d never be among them, and neither would Ruby. But the world felt wicked now. Pressed in the closet with her friend, Ivy feared that this lie was all she had left.
She couldn’t stop herself. “You don’t have to marry him, Ruby.”
“I do.”
Ivy wanted to shake her. “Why?” she whispered. “There’s nothing for us here. These men are all the same. We could leave all this. Escape.”
Weary, Ruby laughed. On the other side of the bedroom door, a baby wailed. Ruby’s mother stirred.
“You should go, Ivy.” Ruby’s hands lay at her sides.
Ivy shook her head. “Your mama won’t mind if I spent the night.”
“No. You should leave the mountain, I mean. Leave me behind.”
The words, knives in Ivy’s back.
Ruby leaned her head against the wall, shut her eyes. “I don’t have the strength for it. I’m not sure I ever did.”
“Listen to me,” Ivy said. “Strength is in my love for you and your love for me. Staying here don’t make you weak. All right?”
Ruby nodded. The floorboards creaked underneath the soft weight of Hasil pulling on his boots in the next room.
“If you want to stay,” Ivy said, “then we’ll stay.”
Before Ruby could protest, Ivy crept across the room and lifted herself out of the window. Then she ran toward her house to bathe the night off her. Once her skin felt clean, if not her conscience, she’d catch a lift toward town, where she’d find her weak-hearted Ricky and agree to marry him. In this she’d join her friend.
Never again would Ivy abandon her.
Both Ruby and Ivy got married in autumn. They stuck to their men, spotted each other from across the gas-station meeting room, and sighed like ghosts. Ivy wondered how they’d gotten so old in only a month’s time. The leaves had yet to fall from the trees, and still all Ivy could feel was winter in her chest.
Her every thought settled on Ruby. So much so that she couldn’t see how well her lovesick husband doted on her. His jars of crocuses went unwatered, his pastel love notes went unread. Ricky even went along to church, though he didn’t care much for it. Jesus, he said, could never give him the high that Percocet did.
Since their night in the Impala, Ivy had fallen for the hero Ricky was, even as she hated him for the hero he wasn’t. The two feelings brawled within her. The only way Ivy could show her husband any affection at all was through barebacked, body-blinding sex. They made love anywhere but their bed—Ivy hoisted herself onto the galley kitchen counter of their trailer, Ricky thrust against the Impala’s backseat, both of them crimped with parched stiltgrass in their backyard. Sex said what Ivy’s mouth couldn’t: It will never be enough.
Ruby’s every move had an edge to it now. She scrubbed Briar’s collared shirts twice as long as she needed to, raking her fingers over the washboard until they bled. She tore out entire seams on her skirts, only to restitch them, and the rainbow colors of her dresses began to fade. She started making soap, then making more. Ivy even ripped off her own buttons just to give Ruby’s hands a fresh purpose. Ruby saw no one, went nowhere, except for Sundays. Every time Ivy caught sight of her vacant gaze looking toward the razorbacks, her own remorse threatened to drown her. Ruby flew to dark places in her mind, leaving Ivy to wonder when—or if—she’d return.
Ivy knew she ought to tell Ruby the truth about that night in the Silverado. But this truth would not set Ivy free. It would cost her. If she lost Ruby, Ivy told herself, she would die. She couldn’t survive life on the mountain alone. The problem was, Ivy couldn’t be sure her friend would survive what haunted her, either. When Ruby’s hands lingered on frosted windowpanes or over a crackling fire long enough to forget all feeling, Ivy feared she was losing her Ruby, even still.
Three years passed slow, then quick, full of nothing days that never seemed to end. Ivy’s Grandmother Harper died the day Ivy went into labor with her firstborn, and Ivy couldn’t parse the ache of losing her from the agony of giving life. When the clinic’s doctor had handed Bobby to her and offered congratulations, she’d wanted to laugh. Congratulate her on what? The life she was given to squander and ruin? She didn’t feel joy. She felt only the purest sense that Bobby belonged to someone else. Even his name—Bobby—sounded like he could have come from anywhere. Some other woman, Ivy knew, could have taken much better care of him. She didn’t know whether Bobby’s rightful father was Flynn or Ricky, and she couldn’t summon enough shame over it to risk breaking her husband’s heart. All Ivy knew: She wasn’t fit for motherhood, even though it was all she had.
Ruby hadn’t felt this way. Having Wren buoyed her, a miracle Ivy thanked God for. Never had Ivy seen a more beautiful baby than Wren, who was rosy and light-eyed like her daddy.
Ruby wouldn’t bear any more children after her first. She didn’t like sex, another sadness Ivy blamed herself for. Ricky remained the only person who knew that Ivy had led Lovett up the mountain, and she shuddered in the face of such unwanted intimacy. He’d seen her at her worst, yet still he wanted her. Ivy had no reason to trust that depth of loyalty from a man. Either he was a fool or he was biding his time to use her secret against her, even though Ricky never would. He loved Ivy and pitied her, though not as much as he pitied himself.
She couldn’t tell Ricky she didn’t want their second child. He wouldn’t understand. Ricky thought babies were all coos and snuggles, little blessings who magically learned to sleep through the night and piss in a toilet. Ivy knew the great pain of bringing a child into the world, and it had nothing to do with labor. It had to do with poverty of choice—either Ivy would give birth to a man or she’d have a daughter who’d grow up to serve one. There ain’t no in-between, as Ruby had said to her once before, when they’d reckoned with abandoning their hills. Ivy knew she had nothing left in her heart to give. Motherhood gave her a lonely squall in her gut, and Ivy didn’t dare bring her affliction to the one person who would help her bear it.
Turned out she didn’t need to. Ruby could sense her friend’s despair from a mile off, the same way bloodhounds knew to search for signs of buried life in the hillside after a heavy snowfall. Ivy, out of luck, was the very thing Ruby needed to revive herself.
It was her idea to give Flynn the baby, her plan to keep Ricky and Briar in the dark. Ivy had always been the conniver among them, but Ruby’s love for her friend brought forth a primeval instinct. Ruby knew what Ivy needed, even when Ivy herself didn’t.
“You don’t have to keep it,” was all Ruby said one morning as they stood side by side at the cliff. Together they stared into the lavender lowlands.
Behind them Wren and Bobby took turns counting paces toward the snake shed. They dared each other to see who could go the farthest in the fog. Five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight. A witchy consonance clung to the mist. Ivy could feel a change stirring, guided by Ruby’s careful hand.
Only after it happened could Ivy see how well Ruby had fixed things for her, and for Flynn, too, by arranging the trade. It seemed simple enough. Ivy would birth the baby, then Ivy would give the baby away. Flynn would have someone to love—an absolution for Bobby, who Ivy alone knew might have been Flynn’s rightful son. In this way Ruby unknowingly worked her own miracle, mending two hearts in one act. It reminded Ivy of how as girls she and Ruby had played tag beneath the gas station’s willow tree, conspiring ways to outlast the boys who circled them. It felt easy then to escape those confines, just as it felt impossible now.
Ivy gave birth the night after Sherrod died. She started having contractions as the sun slipped beneath the Royal Empress trees. Wren had fallen asleep at the foot of Ruby’s bed, and there would be no getting Briar out of the house after dark. Suspicion grew on him quicker than a serpent’s strike. Their only option would be for Ruby to abscond with the infant in the middle of the night.
“This is going to be hard,” Ruby said, grasping her friend’s hand. “But don’t fret. I helped my mama do this plenty. You can’t make a sound.”
Already in enough pain to silence her, Ivy nodded. “You best run out, soon as the baby cries,” she whispered.
Ruby kissed her hand and hoped Briar would sleep soundly. The moon hovered as a fragment of itself. The foxes kept to their dens. Ruby counted these as mercies, just as she did Ivy’s short labor. When it came time to push, Ivy stood, grasped the bedpost in Wren’s tiny bedroom, and bore down.
“It’s another boy,” Ruby said as the baby eased out. He was pink and blue and red, a stark cowlick already swirling on top of his head.
“Do you want to see him?” Ruby asked after she’d finished her work cleaning both Ivy and the baby.
“No,” Ivy said, collapsed on the mattress. “Just go.”
Ruby swaddled the boy tight, and then she hiked to Flynn’s to ask him to take the child as his own. While she was gone, Ivy waited, unable to sleep.
She could not have prepared herself for how much it would hurt to give a baby away. So set in the comfort that her second-born would live a better life as Flynn’s son than as hers, she hadn’t stopped to consider the blow. Ivy didn’t regret it, but the loss flattened her. In the hours after the delivery, her body fought her mind. Her breasts burst with milk for a mouth she couldn’t nurse, and her stomach contracted like it wanted to take back the baby it had let go. She’d go on to have three more boys before the day she died, and all of them she would keep.
Ivy slept, fitfully, then woke and found herself alone in Wren’s room. When Ruby returned with her empty laundry basket, she told Briar in whispers that the baby had died. Ivy listened from the hallway. She cracked the door, and a triangle of light spread across her bare thighs. The lie on Ruby’s lips was sweet, full of mercy. A melody, if ever Ivy had heard one.
Ivy tried to let herself breathe. Then Briar spoke.
“It’s for the best,” he said. He didn’t bother to lower his voice. “You know she ain’t fit.”
The words might have brought Ivy to her knees, if she cared what Briar thought. She waited for Ruby’s reply.
“Ain’t fit for what?” Ruby asked. “Motherhood? Briar, no one is.”
The truth was that Ruby, like Ivy, had nothing left to give. Emptied, the both of them—whether by what happened the night the Silverado went up the mountain or by life itself, Ivy couldn’t figure. But she knew Ruby had marshaled what remained of her strength for her friend, and now it was gone.
Thirteen years passed before Ivy saw Sonny again. She didn’t track the time in years. Instead she tracked it in life lines. Three more boys, born. A father, dead. Ivy didn’t attend the funeral. She and Ruby kept to their daily sacraments—Ivy climbed Ruby’s hill, implored her to leave the house. Returned home before dusk. The rhythm had a natural rise and fall, the breath both Ruby and Ivy drew as one.
The friends aged, but their friendship didn’t. It took on a hot, static distance—not because Ruby and Ivy were distant from each other but because Ruby was distant from herself. Ivy couldn’t understand how Briar didn’t see it. Ivy ached to be so blind. She longed to find that kind of distance from herself, even as it seemed to shred Ruby to bits. The secret Ivy kept was a burdensome pet, one she needed to groom and feed. Every time she drove past the Saw-Whet’s empty lot, Ivy looked for a white Silverado—even though she never saw one. She found herself hunting for noise, running from the quiet. Always Ruby’s mournful voice followed her.
The day before she caught fire, Ivy fell sick. It started with a string of dizzy spells, each worse than the last. Next came a heat rash that swept across her chest and back. She vomited, steadied herself. Checked the calendar she kept in the drawer of her bedside table.
She counted the days—thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five. A familiar weight cradled near her navel, told her what she already thought she knew.
Ivy was pregnant.
She forgot about her promise to meet Ruby and Wren that morning—something Ivy had never done. Instead she left her boys with Ricky and sped down the mountain. At the Shop ’n Save, she stole a pregnancy test. The inside of her Pontiac sweltered as she sat in the backseat, waiting for the results.
Down the street she saw Flynn’s Tacoma parked at Teddy’s Tavern. Ivy watched him unload a few cases of moonshine and take them through Teddy’s back door. Sonny stood in the truck bed, sweeping dust into the street. A fissure in Ivy’s chest—her baby had grown into a strong young man. Flynn had done that. And, in a way, so had she.
She looked down at the test, tried to divine some truth from it. Was that a line she saw—the faintest pink horizon? She looked again and saw nothing, like her body was waiting to decide.
Ivy felt the truth then. She didn’t want another baby. She also didn’t want to give another baby away. Ivy opened the Pontiac’s back door and fell out of it before vomiting on the grass. Then she looked up, blinked against the sheen of the sun. A soft shadow moved in. Ivy wiped the side of her mouth and blinked again. Her vision went from black to gray to light. Then she caught sight of Sonny Sherrod staring back at her.
“Ma’am,” he said, touching her elbow. “You all right?”
He helped Ivy to her feet. A stark gravity stretched between them as Ivy got drawn into Sonny’s orbit. She felt herself ever spinning, unable to stop.
“Ma’am,” Sonny tried again. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, locked herself in her car. Drove homeward, Sonny a distant sun in her rearview mirror, as Ivy wished for some way to heal one wound without creating another.
Later that night Ivy penned the longest letter she’d ever written to her best friend. My Confession, she titled it on the envelope. She tucked it into the drawer of her bedside table and promised herself one day she’d find the strength to give it to Ruby.
Inside the letter Ivy revealed everything she hadn’t had the courage to say when they were just seventeen and itching to leave the mountain behind. She admitted she’d led Lovett to Ruby that terrible night, and that she’d never wanted to risk losing Ruby by telling her the truth. Ivy never blamed Lovett like she blamed herself. She couldn’t show herself any mercy. No one had ever offered her any.
I’m sorry, Ivy wrote at the end of the letter. I’m so sorry.
The next morning Ivy rose before dawn, feeling sicker than she ever had. She wheezed, felt a chill, and tried in vain to ease the rash on her body with beeswax salve and tallow. Even a thick curtain of ointment didn’t quell the itch on her skin. She and her boys walked to Ruby’s cabin in a haze, and when she saw Ruby’s face hovering above the fire pit next to Briar’s snake shed, she wanted so much to fall into the arms of her friend, to lay the lonely burden down, that she tripped over the hem of her dress and found the flame instead.
The words she’d wanted to offer rang in her head as the blaze spread around her and the razorbacks in the distance glowed like the sun.
We should have run that day Briar got struck, Ruby. We should have run and never looked back.
Dear Wren,
I have to tell you—
The only legend that ever really mattered was ours.