The medal hadn’t been the oldest thing that Zach had brought with him, but it had the most attached. Psalms and hymns were a balm to the faithful, but spilled blood was a stained memory. You passed down stories of soldiers, not choirboys.
The fact that he had brought more than one talisman from his family was touching. It said something about the boy, even if the Greshams of the past were a sorry and sordid lot who would rather see their Neighbor buried than stand up to another man.
Motheater remembered very little of her past, of the specifics. She remembered her deep anger, hauling Will out of the mountain during a cave-in, but how did he end up in the Church of the Rock? How did she end up fighting against her father one last time? The bruise was still fresh around her neck, and she wore it like a torque, something honored.
Motheater steadied herself, squeezed Zach’s hand, and tugged on the time around the medal. She slipped backward, the rage and bitterness consuming her.
Anger was something she understood.
Zach’s hand was an anchor, a steady heartbeat in the present that kept Motheater from disappearing into the last moments of Hal Gresham’s life, age seventy-three, a heart attack at home, gone forty years after the Second Great War. She walked past him, trying not to stare at the tanks, ignoring the machine gun fire that felt like an excavation. She tried to forget that they were mining men.
From Hal, she spoke to Uriel Gresham (of Kiron, Virginia) and Bernadette Yaeger (formerly of Allenville, Kentucky), a couple of lovebirds who failed to ever get married and caused a scandal as they raised a family together anyway. In the early twentieth century, with the memory of a war of kindred still fresh on the ground, the nation bearing scars of self-flagellation, their friends didn’t blame them for not wanting to graft two things together when there were so many axes waiting.
Motheater took a deep breath, knowing that she was treading on the eidolon of memory, the stories passed hand over fist like a bucket of coal. She went through Zach to Hal to Uriel to William.
Zach bore the weight of history in his bones, the marrow of himself formed from generations of Gresham men, family roots spreading like capillaries through his strong arms. Zach shuddered as Motheater found William, and it was easy to read their past in the calluses of Zach’s hands. She tapped into his ancestors like a coal vein. She tried not to bare her teeth, not to clench his hands too tight, but here was William, huddled in a Halberd cabin down in Hatfield, and here was the plan laid out on the table.
No, it wasn’t enough; this was the plan, but what was the reason? There had to be a purpose.
William was a miner, and she sifted through his memories, the shadows of them she could pull out of Zach’s skin. She saw Will sitting at a table her fire-adders had snuck into over the winter, and the memory of them burned her hands. She was so close. She almost knew herself again.
William wasn’t speaking, but he watched as one of the managers working for Halberd Ore and Mineral laid out a map of the area. Motheater observed over his shoulder. The map was beautiful, and Halberd had obviously taken a lot of care to create an exact map of this area of the Appalachians, noting Kire Mountain and the surrounding various elevations in soft blue lines. The town of Kiron was marked in red, homesteads and public buildings ticked up the mountain in maroon. The two mining excavations were green, and there were a few symbols for prospective slough shafts, dumpsites, refineries, and roads.
Motheater walked around the table, examining the map. She hadn’t dragged Zach bodily with her, but she could feel him just behind her temples, an ache, a ghost behind her eyes. He was here, too, seeing what she saw. Maybe he would recognize the sections of the map that were blurry, maybe forgotten, maybe lost. She saw one last symbol, high on the western side of the mountain, a small cross for the church.
As she circled the map, she held tighter onto the medal awarded for a war that hadn’t happened yet, and the map came into sharp relief. Halberd had acquired mineral rights for Kire, and judging by this map, they had managed to slink into the forest when she wasn’t looking. There were notes that marked where dowsers and corers had identified possible dig sites. One of them was right by the church.
There were other sites scoped out, too, farther along the ridge into West Virginia, places that felt familiar to Motheater, but not for any reason she remembered. It was an itch along her neck, something heavy that weighed on her. Motheater circled the memory, eyes fixed on her small town that threatened to be enveloped by a destruction called progress.
“Preacher won’t stand for it,” William said, glancing up at the foreman. “That church has been there before Christian folk came ’round the mountain. He believes God created that church alongside the sun and stars. He calls Kiron the Sinai of the Americas.”
“Preacher doesn’t have to like anything. Not-liking won’t stop us from carving that church out from under him and his flock,” the foreman said. Even with a century of distance, Motheater could feel the sneer as if it were pressed against her face. “If he won’t let us come in the front door, we’ll blast that damn church off the mountain. See what he does with rubble.”
William glanced down at the table. The men next to him appeared, coalescing out of his memory. Representatives of Kiron and the freetown nearby. That was Nathan Benneke, a freeman who made sure the Black folk got all the news they needed from Kiron, who cried during the Easter stations; here was Jack Spencer, a white man who had seven daughters who called Motheater sister, because she had pulled them out of Dinah Spencer’s womb one by one; the fourth was Collum Calhoun, a Native man whose brother led the twenty-second Kanawha infantry during the war. Something about Collum pulled at her, and she stared at the old man, the dark lines of his face that seemed to have dust tattooed into them.
“Ain’t you heard of the preacher’s daughter?” William asked, leaning forward. “Ain’t no love lost between ’em, but she won’t let nothing happen to that church.”
“I’ll inform you just the once that I don’t give a shit about what a woman wants,” the foreman said, pointing at the church. “We have received information on good authority that there’s a thick rib of coal under that building, and if the preacher won’t step off a cliff, we’ll evict him.”
Collum was looking down at his hands. Jack elbowed him. Collum glared and then looked up at the foreman. “I got as much invested in this mountain as any man here. But you ain’t from here, Mister Ochiltree, and you ain’t seen what that girl can do. She ain’t one for edicts.”
“What in the bloody fuck does that mean?” Ochiltree snapped. Motheater’s hands twitched. She couldn’t do magic in here, couldn’t tear Ochiltree’s throat out with her teeth. She was a catamount in the shadows, only here to watch.
“She a witch,” Collum said, calm as a cold still. “My son’s one who calls on her kindly. I seen her do things you ain’t want to cross, whistle, nor look twice at.”
Ochiltree, who wore a suit with hand-stitched lapels and had a linen cravat tucked disastrously into his front pocket, snorted. Motheater walked around the table, narrowing her eyes. All the features of these men were fuzzy with age, but Ochiltree was clearer—he had been at the church. He was wearing a Halberd Co. pin, right at his collarbone, and Motheater had to clutch onto Gresham’s dead medal in her hand to keep herself grounded in the past. “A witch. You can’t be serious.”
Collum looked down the line of Kiron miners and foremen. All of them refused to meet his eye.
“If one of you good folks don’t speak up, I’m liable to throw you out and cut you from any deal we may foster here today,” Ochiltree growled. “I’ve seen that girl around—she came into the camp naught three weeks ago, begging us to take her south to dowse away from Kire. Just because none of you are man enough to tame her doesn’t make her a witch.”
Besides Ochiltree and the Kiron men, there were two others from Halberd. A tall man who seemed to loom over the map even sitting down, blue eyes drawn down. The third stood in the corner, wearing a long red jacket that looked new, staring at the ground. Something about him tugged at Motheater.
William shifted and nodded. “Mister Calhoun’s right,” he said quietly. He still had scrapes on his face, but Motheater struggled to remember why they were familiar. What happened to Will Gresham?
“I saw that girl talk to hare bucks at midnight,” Jack added. “She cured some scarlet fever a few years ago. When she was thirteen, she preached bravery into a union regiment heading south, and all of ’em returned in two weeks, medaled up and given a hero’s pension. All Kiron knows her and where she stands.”
“You cannot believe that you have a witch in your town. I refuse to accept it.” None of the men moved. Ochiltree glanced over them, down at the map, and then back to the miners. “Do the rest of the good Christian folk of this town believe this same nonsense?”
“She’s a well-known Neighbor, sir.” Jack shrugged. “They come to her for balms, potions, medicine of any kind. She made a girl’s freckles disappear just last week.”
Ochiltree snorted. “The fact that you all believe this bitch has some kind of power is bad enough; the fact she’s got the entire town wrapped around her fantasy is a fool’s war.”
Motheater almost got angry, but she pressed it down. She had to stay focused. She forced herself to watch William’s face, gone pale and confused. What was he thinking?
Collum shook his head, a lick of his black hair, held back with an oil pomade, falling across his dead eye. “Ain’t no flight of fancy, sir. She’s a Neighbor, sure as I’m a miner and you’re a businessman.”
“I do not have the time to deal in rumors and stupidity,” Ochiltree snapped.
“That witch is not a rumor,” William said carefully. “Now, I ain’t call her friend, but it pays to be on speaking terms with her. Her father’s only got love for her when she brings in a tithe to the church. But mark me, you go after her with a gun on a dark night, you’re liable to end up with parts of you in three different hollers.”
“Ain’t no exaggerating, neither. Remember Rare Thomson?” Nathan shifted in his chair. “He took a fancy to her and tried courting her. Poor boy ended up spread across the Appalachians like butter.”
Ochiltree’s face was red. He was the only man standing at the table, and his fists were clenched tight around a ruler, looking like it might snap. Motheater circled him, glaring, only half paying attention to the memory she was here to witness.
“You mean to tell me that the mere thought of this one woman is enough to turn you all into cowards? To turn away from any progress and fortune the collective could offer to you and your backwater town? You’re all content to eat gruel and shine all for the sake of a rumor?”
“Now, Mister Ochiltree.” Collum leaned forward in his chair. “You ain’t truly met her. She came to you hoping to trick you into thinking she was just another woman, just a dowser looking for trade. You ain’t know her. I’ll forgive what you said about my own fortitude, but just the once.” His voice was measured, but there was a tone that came off sharp as stone’s cleavage, and Motheater frowned deeply.
His son was Jasper Calhoun. Jasper was her pack. Where was Jasper now? She remembered and felt it slip away. A pain in her chest, a sharpness like a needle. How could she have forgotten her friend? Where was Jasper? She jolted and looked up at the man in the corner.
His name was DeWitt.
As Ochiltree sat down, Motheater went around to DeWitt, trying to parse his memory. DeWitt had come to her . . . and to Jasper.
Her mouth went dry.
“Fine. There’s other parts of the ridge. We’ll deal with the witch later,” Ochiltree said, drawing Motheater’s attention back to the map.
Motheater bared her teeth at him. There was a bit of protection around Kire; she remembered turning away their dowsers, hanging squirrel bones to haunt the woods, making circle paths to turn inspectors around on their tail, burying jars of piss to keep them out. But looking down at the map, Halberd’s sneaks had still managed to get veins out of Potts and Huckleberry, and even Locust Knob, far closer to Kire than she would have liked.
“We might have to deal with her sooner rather than later,” William said, shaking his head. “She lives somewhere along those mountains. She’ll turn up, and she’s made clear she ain’t gonna endure industry mining.”
Jack, Nathan, and Collum went still. William’s hands were shaking. He wasn’t looking up at Ochiltree at all. He was barely keeping it together. What had happened to him? Motheater went and crouched by his side, trying to find answers in a memory. This was a shadow, a shade, and there wasn’t much she could do from this distance, from so far away.
“What do you mean, ‘she lives somewhere’?” Ochiltree groaned.
Collum gestured over the map. “Her house ain’t normal. It’s got a path, and a few signs along property she’s claimed, but the only people who find her house are them that got her permission to enter. And if you go in protected by another Neighbor, she’s got all manner of curses strung up to call you off and get you lost in the dark.”
A movement—Motheater stared at DeWitt. He had flinched. Motheater suddenly remembered when the company man came to her forest in the dark. His rabbit heart still beat, even now, even then. She could feel it scrabbling in the blood.
“Jesus Christ, you people.” Ochiltree rubbed his temple. “You understand I can’t tell anyone in Richmond about this? That there’s some—and I hesitate to even use these words, gentlemen, as it seems like it only encourages this delusion—but you are of the opinion that there’s some Appalachian witch standing in between you and the coal that will go to rebuild our nation?”
Collum shrugged. “If you can’t appease the witch, you ain’t going to move nothing out of our town.”
“We’ve invested in Kiron specifically to get into Kire Mountain,” Ochiltree said sharply, accusing. “We brought you four in to help us get started, to convince the town to get behind us. We will not be turned away.”
Nathan looked over the map. “Preacher’s more keen to listen as long as you keep off his church land. Coal has made Kiron a decent place. Tithe is enough to keep his church full of new books and coated in fresh paint.”
Motheater felt a stone in her throat.
“You think that this preacher is willing to compromise?” Ochiltree asked.
“I’m saying that maybe he’d be willing to help you get rid of his daughter if you agreed to let his land alone. He might know how to put the witch in the ground, and if you help him get rid of her, you might get a crack at the north half of the mountain, and the rest of the unmanned ridges up here,” Nathan continued, drawing his hand up the peaks along the Virginia border. “But this . . .”
“She looks after all that land,” William said, finding his voice again. “And right now, we don’t know where she is.”
“Well then,” Ochiltree said, still frowning. “If this is the only way you men are willing to move forward, fine. Get your little town on track, and we’ll go talk to the preacher.”
Collum’s face was blurry. The whole memory was fading. Collum’s eyes slid closed, and he pressed his hands tight against his legs. He held his own kind of hatred for her. Was it so bad that Jasper had been like a brother to her? Was it so sickening that she kept his company?
Motheater focused on the map. William, Collum, and the other town leaders finally managed to shake hands with Ochiltree and leave the room. DeWitt stepped forward, through Motheater’s body, and the witch was left, a swiftly fading shadow. She felt his heart beat, a stuttering banjo through her chest as he left her to fade. She tried to latch on to the last moments of this memory, analyzing the parts of the mountain before she let herself fall back in time, pulling herself, drop by drop, out of Zach’s bloodstream, and into the arms of Bennie Mattox.