Adelaide found the padlock on the ground, held it up to inspect. Not broken open.
It had been unlocked.
Her key no longer hung on the nail by the stove.
It was on the ground, here by the trunk.
“You opened this,” Adelaide said softly.
When she finally looked back, Matthew was propped against the overturned great chair. He held his rifle at his waist. The barrel aimed at her.
“Move aside,” Matthew said, though his voice came out weak. “Move aside and I’ll kill it.”
Adelaide slipped the padlock back into its slot. Inside the trunk the creature breathed slowly, already returned to a kind of hibernation.
“You opened this,” Adelaide repeated.
“Only thing in here that’s all locked up,” he said.
The rifle barrel quivered with the weight. He held the rifle in his left arm but he was right-handed. His right arm lay tucked tight against his side, the sleeve of his shirt sagged loosely up by the shoulder. But then she realized he was just as naked as her and the sagging fabric was actually his skin.
“I just wanted to see what was inside,” he told her.
“While I was asleep?”
He shook his head stiffly. “Call me a thief but you’ve got a devil in your home.”
Adelaide watched him a moment. Already he seemed a bit stronger than he had been. Not recovered, nowhere near it, but maybe he wouldn’t die. Instead, he would only disappoint.
Adelaide wasn’t even angry with him. Not truly. Every man and woman out here, every child and every beast, was well acquainted with desperation. Mr. Olsen had been right. This land is trying to kill every single one of us, let me tell you.
Matthew had thought to pilfer her treasure but found only her curse.
“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Let me help you.”
The rifle dipped down, as if it was nodding off, but rose once more.
“Will it get out again?” he asked.
“Not if you don’t steal my key again.”
Adelaide brought down a lamp near the stove and lit it. She scanned his right arm, his head and back. “I’ve seen it do worse,” Adelaide said.
She dressed his wounds, using napkins and a tablecloth, and set him on her bed to sleep the last of the night away. His eyes fluttered shut.
As she cleaned the cabin, she felt strangely relieved. She didn’t know what Matthew would do with what he’d seen tonight. Spread the news around his camp? Wrangle up his uncle and a few other boys, then come back to try and kill the creature? If she’d been younger, more naïve, she might have hoped for such a thing. For the cavalry, for rescue. But she wasn’t a child. Matthew would have to bring a lot of men if he hoped to hurt the creature. She doubted there were enough in all of Montana. That’s the whole point of a curse, isn’t it? You are doomed to live with it.
While he lay in the bed, eyelids half closed and his eyes swimming, Adelaide spoke to him.
“It arrived on our doorstep the same day, the same minute, my mother gave birth to me. She received her blessing and her curse in an instant. Was it left there? Did it bubble up from the depths of hell? No one could say. My father had been in the fields working while my mother was in labor. It was the midwife who found it.
“At first she took it for an animal. Maybe a mountain lion’s cub, or a rattlesnake, but when she picked it up it bit off the top of her thumb and she threw it down in our home and she fled, never returned. But folks began telling tales. Queer folk, that’s what they said about the Henrys.”
Adelaide shivered, not from the cold but from the confession. Why didn’t her parents get rid of it? Stomp it to death there on the threshold of their home? She’d asked them this question when she was young, but their answers always seemed to skirt the truth. By the time Adelaide had been old enough to understand anything, her parents had already become resigned to life with their burden and couldn’t imagine it any other way, so they chose privacy instead. Her parents barricaded themselves from the rest of the world and thus they trapped her inside the family’s secret, too. Shut your mouth; don’t share our shame. This might have been the Henry family’s motto.
Sure, the other families in Lucerne Valley might have whispered about them, but all they truly knew was that Glenville and Eleanor ran a profitable farm, that their daughter worked the land and rarely played with other children, and when they came to church on Sundays the Henrys always sat in the back pew, last to arrive and first to leave. They did bring plums to share with the congregation after service, and that’s the only thing that kept them in good standing.
Even though Matthew had fallen into the deep sleep of damaged health, Adelaide felt good speaking her family history out loud. Just letting the words escape her lips made her feel close to crying. This story had spent three decades chewing up her insides.
“But the question I used to ask my mother and father most of all was, Why us? What did they do to bring this curse down upon them?”
She watched Matthew as if he might, right now, whisper the answer, but of course he could barely breathe. She patted Matthew’s face with a cloth.
“Or was it my fault?” she whispered.