It snowed five feet on the day Papa disappeared. The cows were calving down in the old orchard and Mama and Papa were with them most of the day. I fixed dinner–beans and cornbread, some greens Mama had canned with fatback over the fire in the summer. I sat by the stove and Percy sat with me, winding his mottled tail around my feet and mewing.

But no one came home.

It was full dark when I set out after them. I banked the fire so it wouldn’t go out before we got back. I pulled Papa’s old long johns off the line where they’d been drying over the stove and pulled them up around my hips. On the back porch, I fired up the rusty old Coleman lantern like Papa had taught me and set off in his old rubber boots down the hill. Percy, like any sensible cat, stayed behind.

In the old orchard, the trees twisted like gaunt ghosts. I ran my fingers over those nearest me, murmuring their names: Black Gillyflower, Stayman Winesap, Crispin, Northern Spy. My great-grandpa had brought them all from hither and yon. Back in his day, our farm yielded the best cider in all these hills. But then came Prohibition and the Depression and people couldn’t really afford cider or even the luxury of buying bushels of apples to can apple pie filling. These days, the apples got fed to the cows.

I lifted the lantern, looking for Mama and Papa, but the curtain of snow kept me from seeing very far. A shape leaning against the fence, like a body doubled over in pain, startled me. I peered at it and finally saw the calf-shaped mound. A heifer underneath the trees lowed softly.

I went to the calf. Her eyelashes were ice-crusted, her breaths coming shallow and so slow that I almost thought she wasn’t breathing. I dusted the snow off her. I put her head in my coat to try to thaw the ice from her eyes. My toes were going numb in the rubber boots from the cold.

She collapsed to her knees with a little huff.

She was dying.

I didn’t know where Mama or Papa were and I wasn’t sure what to do. But I knew I wasn’t going to let this calf die. I set the lantern down in the snow. I took off my coat and put it over her, and then, not knowing what else to do, I laid across her, hoping I could warm her up enough to get her over to her mama.

The snow fell in wet needles down my neck and back, working its cold fingers through my old holey sweater and into my flour sack dress. The light from the lantern was a little red moon on the hissing snowbank. Finally, I felt the calf’s breathing getting faster, more regular. She struggled beneath me, and I scrambled up off her.

She wobbled to her feet. I couldn’t carry her, but I led her over under the trees to the heifer I was sure was her mama. Luckily, the cow was too cold or confused to be nasty to me. She let me shove the calf’s head into her udder. The sound of that calf sucking milk was the best sound I thought I’d ever heard.

I went back and got the lantern and watched the two of them–mama and calf anchored together against the trunk of the old Imperial tree. I was shivering and wet and couldn’t feel my fingers as well as my toes now, but I felt so triumphant I didn’t really care. If the cow was all right and the calf could keep sucking, I might just have saved her.

Worried that Mama and Papa might have passed me on their way up to the house, I headed toward the bottom of the pasture holding the lantern high and calling out. The cows grunted and shuffled away from me, disappearing under snow-heavy branches.

I saw Mama by the gate near the old Seek-No-Further tree. In the summertime, this was the tree I liked to climb best. It was the oldest tree in the orchard and I liked lying along its branches and looking up at the mountain at sunset. If I could steal away from chores long enough to do it. I would stare up at the little line of seven crosses that stitched the hill–my brothers and sisters who hadn’t lived. And I’d swear that their little souls were in the leaves and branches under me, their silver laughter in the whispers of the trees. The apple trees were my brothers and sisters now.

Mama was with a heifer that had struggled from the looks of it. There was no calf in sight, but the snow was black with her blood. Mama was covered up to her elbows in it–her old gray man’s coat was black to the shoulders. Her hands and hair and face were crusted with it.

Mama leaned on her shovel up against an old apple tree, her eyes half-closed, looking for all the world like the calf I’d just saved. She waved the light away.

“Had to bury the calf,” she said breathlessly. “Don’t want the coyotes coming.” She indicated the mound that I could barely see under the Seek-No-Further tree. The snow was so deep now. No wonder Mama was tired, if she’d had to dig through all that frozen ground in addition to helping deliver the stillborn calf.

I decided not to say anything about saving the calf further up the orchard. It might make Mama think I was bragging.

I raised the lantern to see past the gate. The creek bottom was dark with bowed-over slippery elm, and the hillside rose, a white-faced shadow through the curtain of falling snow.

“Where’s Papa?” I asked.

“He’s gone to see about another cow up in the north pasture,” Mama said. “He’ll follow us.”

I nodded, wishing I’d thought to bring him a thermos of coffee.

“Let’s get on up to the house,” Mama said, her voice breathy with exhaustion.

“She’ll be all right?” I said, nodding toward the cow.

“Her kind been doing this sort of thing without help longer than we’ve been around, Ilsa,” Mama said. “Don’t you worry.”

“But the coyotes…”

“Ilsa,” Mama said.

When she said my name twice, I knew she meant business. Besides, I was pretty sure my toes were frozen now anyway.

I led the way up to the house. Papa’s boots squelched on my feet like frightened mice. She followed me, using the shovel like a walking stick. I imagined her boots behind me, making red tracks in the snow.

#

Papa never came home that night.

And still the snow kept falling.

#

Two days later, the old Buick was a white hump in the driveway. I shoveled a path up to it three or four times in one day before I finally gave up. When she wasn’t out seeing to the cows, Mama sat by the woodstove. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying or not. I did my crying out on the back porch, holding Percy so tight he finally yowled in protest and squirmed free of me.

Truth was this wasn’t unusual for Papa. Sometimes he’d be gone for days at a time. Mama always said he was helping with somebody else’s cattle or helping put up hay. But I knew better. He’d come home red-faced and laughing, draping his arm around Mama’s neck all loose and loverly and I knew something wasn’t right. But Mama would never own that anything was amiss.

This time was different, though. He’d been helping Mama. He’d been around for a couple weeks, a little shaky and grumpy around the edges, but here. He must have just gotten lost in the storm.

Mama made me stay in the house while she went out looking for him every day. I started worrying she’d disappear too before she finally came back, her hair and the upturned collar of the old coat heavy with white. Even her eyelashes were frosted with crystals. But where the blood stained the coat, no ice formed, like the sleeve was still warm and steaming from the cow’s blood.

Finally, defeated, Mama gave up and said we ought to walk over to Mrs. Grayson’s and ask to use the telephone. Mrs. Grayson was the only one on the hill who had a telephone and she loved lording it over all the rest of us who didn’t. Which was why I reckon Mama wasn’t keen on asking to use it, especially because of what she had to use it for.

We trudged up the snow-packed walk and along the road for a mile or two until we came to Mrs. Grayson’s perfectly shoveled driveway. The rose arbor was an arch of ice over her walk and icicles frosted the big wrap-around porch clear around to the back of the house. Mama’s eyes traveled the length and breadth of the big house before she set her foot on the first step. This house used to belong to Mama’s grandparents, but then most of the farm had to be sold when the hard times hit. All Mama’s family had been able to save was our little bit of acreage with its orchard and the falling-down house that once belonged to sharecroppers. The big house and most of the good land went to the Graysons and we were left watching them make good on what had once been ours. Even though she never said it out loud, I knew Mama hated them for it.

If I squinted through the cypress trees just right I could see our little house nestled in its divot on the hill. I could see the rucked-up roof, the peeling paint, the edge of the leaning barn. Except for the couple of hens pecking around the yard, it looked like somebody had abandoned our house long ago.

Not so with the Graysons. Everything, even the indoor/outdoor carpet on the porch, looked brand-new. I thought about the ratty old Sears Roebuck catalog we once kept on the shelf of our kitchen. Mama and I used to take it down and make wish lists on chunks of bark with charcoal. Then, Mama lost interest in doing that and scolded me one time when I took out the catalog to do it. “Ain’t no use wishing for things we can’t have,” she’d say. But I still sneak it up under my old quilt sometimes and look at it and think about the things I want, even though it’s years since that catalog first came out.

Mama drew herself up as tall as she could before knocking on the door. She tried rolling up the sleeves of the coat to hide the cow blood, but they were too stiff. I’m sure Mrs. Grayson was already hiding behind the door. Her boys’ dogs had been barking up a storm since we turned down the driveway. But she of course loved having the pleasure of forcing people to knock at her door and wait on her, so that’s what we did.

I could almost time the minutes it would take Mrs. Grayson to answer, and she was right on schedule when she flung the door open and said, “LuEllen and dear little Ilsa, what a surprise!”

I shuffled uncomfortably, feeling myself growing red. I wasn’t all that little anymore, but Mrs. Grayson sure had a way of making me feel like it.

“Come in, come in,” she said, making wide, welcoming hand motions. Papa used to joke that one sweep of her arm could fell an ox; I tried to steer clear of her.

She ushered us into the warmth and heavenly smells of her house–roasted chicken and blackberry pie. I had to use the corner of my sleeve to wipe the spit off my mouth, trying not to think about the last time we’d had any meat.

“Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Coffee? Tea?” She started fussing around the counter, but Mama stopped her.

“No, ma’am,” she said. “We don’t want to trouble you and we won’t be that long.”

Mrs. Grayson looked at Mama sharply. “You breeding, LuEllen? You look a little green.”

Mama blushed to the roots of her hair. I don’t think I’d ever seen her do that before.

And then I realized what she meant.

“Yes,” Mama said, her voice a sliver of sound. “Yes, I am.”

I stared at her in horror.

No. Not again.

Mrs. Grayson sniffed. “Thought so. I know it when I see it.”

Mama shifted uncomfortably, plucking at one of her rolled-up sleeves. “That ain’t why I’m here, though.” Her mouth turned down, and I thought she might cry.

I thought I might cry again, too. Mama with a baby on the way and Papa disappeared? I remembered all the other times she’d labored. All the babies had died except for me. One little brother had made it to walking before he’d succumbed to the scarlet fever. It had been a year or two since The Boy (as we called him, for we didn’t name them anymore) had died, and I’d hoped for Mama’s sake that it never happened again.

“What’s wrong, LuEllen?” Mrs. Grayson asked.

“Ilsa’s daddy’s gone missing,” Mama said. “I need to call up the sheriff and see if he’s heard anything.”

Now here’s the thing. Mrs. Grayson knows that Papa has gone missing before. In fact, we’ve even stood in the kitchen on a winter’s day like this, though the wind was howling and there wasn’t any snow. And Mama had had to admit that she hadn’t seen Papa for days. Later on, one of the oldest Grayson boys had brought Papa in his car and helped carry him in the house. (Mr. Grayson died years ago of a heart attack during haying season.) I heard him say something about having to sleep it off. Mama told me to go to my room.

Mrs. Grayson looked at the blood on Mama’s coat sleeves, at the way Mama’s hair straggled around her face. She squeezed Mama’s shoulder.

“You sit down over there, and I’ll ring up the sheriff.”

She went out to the receiver in the hall. I could hear her pick up the speaker, then the long pause until she shouted at Mabel the operator to get the sheriff. During all that time, Mama’s eyes were fixed on some indefinite point out beyond Mrs. Grayson’s kitchen window. Everything about her was still as fallen snow and yet fragile as ice. I was afraid if I tried to talk to her or touch her, she would break into tiny, blood-stained shards.

“Mabel,” Mrs. Grayson yelled through the speaking piece. “Mabel, it’s Mary Grayson. We need the sheriff up here quick.”

I could hear the operator squawking, something about “that John Lewis again.”

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Grayson said. “He’s gone missing in all this snow.”

There was more squawking and then Mrs. Grayson replaced the speaking piece and turned to Mama. I was shocked that for once Mrs. Grayson had had the manners not to tell God and everybody that Mama was going to have another baby. I reckoned that would come later, after we’d left.

“They’ll send him up soon as they can,” Mrs. Grayson said.

Mama nodded and stood.

“You sure you don’t want to wait here, LuEllen?” Mrs. Grayson said. “Y’all are welcome to stay for dinner while you wait.”

Mama’s mouth hardened. “No thank you, Mary,” she said. “I ought to be at the house when the sheriff gets there.”

I wanted more than anything for Mrs. Grayson to suggest she wrap up some of that pie so we could take it with us, but I knew Mama would refuse even that. And Mrs. Grayson’s kindness, as it turned out, didn’t extend quite that far.

She ushered us back toward the door and we set off back through the snow. I couldn’t stop looking at Mama’s belly as her coat swished back and forth while she walked. I could guess why she hadn’t said anything. I wondered if she was ever planning to say anything at all. Probably there was no need. I imagined another little cross stitching the hill next to a big cross for Papa. I opened my eyes wide so the cold could freeze my tears.

Mama took to sitting by the stove again as soon as we got in. She wrung her hands over and over as close to the heat as she could, as if they were frostbit and she couldn’t get them warm.

“Mama,” I said. I knew better than to tax her, but I couldn’t help but ask. “Do you think Papa’s…dead?”

The dull look in Mama’s eyes belied the words that came out of her mouth. “You shouldn’t be asking such questions, girl. Such bad thoughts are likely to make a thing come true.”

I kept my mouth shut after that. I didn’t want my thoughts to be the reason for losing Papa. I didn’t say anything about the baby at all.

#

When the sheriff came, he took off his cap and nodded to me, his big nose all red from the cold. Mama put on her bloodied coat again and led him toward the door.

“Stay here, Ilsa,” she said to me before I could question her. “We don’t need the house burning down, too.”

“But…” I wanted to say that Mama shouldn’t be out in the cold so much, with her going to have a baby and all, but I didn’t want to embarrass Mama in front of the sheriff.

Before Mama could say anything, the sheriff said gently, “It’s not a thing you’ll want to see, darlin’, even if we do find him out there. Best stay here where it’s warm and have some coffee ready for when we come back.” He looked around the bare kitchen and said, “If you got any coffee, that is.”

I nodded, blushing a little. Nobody but Papa ever called me darlin’. We had just a little chicory coffee left. Papa had been saying he’d get more at the Feed & Seed, but there wasn’t money for it, so Mama said.

But the sheriff would have it and we’d go without if we had to, I decided.

I waited in the silence while they waded out through the snow. Daddy’s old fiddle leaned against the faded wall and I remembered how he used to play and sing that old song “Barbry Ellen.” Red rose wrapped round the green briar…

Mama didn’t like that song much, for some reason.

In the end, the sheriff and Mama came back and drank coffee. They didn’t find anything, and the sheriff said he would get a search party together with dogs and they’d look until they found Papa.

He questioned Mama and me again about the last time we’d seen Papa and what we were doing on the night of the snow. The expression on his face as we answered didn’t look promising. I felt like there were things he wanted to say, just not in front of me.

Finally, he stood, sighing, and put on his hat again.

“Thank you kindly for the coffee, Miss Ilsa,” he said, with a nod toward me. “LuEllen, I’ll bring the men around tomorrow. You have Mary give us a holler if anything changes.”

Mama nodded and rose with him. “Will do.”

I watched him walk out through the snow drifts, their tops watery pink with the setting sun.

The men came the next day. They searched that day and the next and the next. They put up posters with a bad picture of Papa from when he was a teenager. They asked all through the county and into the next few counties. Reporters came and asked us the same questions everyone did.

In the end, all the answers were the same.

Papa was gone and no one could find him.

#

By the time spring came and the snow melted, the sheriff pronounced Papa dead. We had a funeral for him, but Mama couldn’t afford to pay for an empty casket, so the preacher came and spoke his piece in the orchard.

The apple trees were in bloom and their chilly, white petals patted my face like little hands as we stood under the old trees. Mama’s belly was starting to show and you couldn’t miss the glances and whispers as she stood with her head bowed under the blossoms. I looked up to the hill with its little white crosses. I would make one for Papa and put it up there with the others. It seemed wrong not to. The clean smell of apple blossom clung to my hair and hands long after we’d gone inside, lingering like the memories of Papa I couldn’t chase away, like the whispers of brothers and sisters who had never spoken.

Mama took me out of school to help her around the farm. Even though Papa hadn’t always been there, he’d been there enough. With him permanently gone and a baby on the way, she needed me more than ever, especially as the calves grew and lambing season came on and the fields needed plowing.

I worked day and night until my back and arms were hard as tree branches. When I looked in the tarnished old mirror above the washtub, I looked more like a boy than a girl–scrawny, hard arms and brown legs. I didn’t look at my face. I didn’t want to see Papa’s eyes staring back at me. At night, I whittled a cross of apple branches for Papa. I thought about making one at the same time for what grew in Mama’s belly, but I decided against it. Best not to dig him a grave before he’d had a chance to live. Somehow I knew it was another baby brother.

I painted Papa’s cross with whitewash when I had a chance, and on a summer night, I climbed the hill and planted it next to all the others. I looked down the wide valley then, our little broken house nestled above the gently-stirring sea of apple leaves. The sun was setting behind me; the valley breathed twilight. The first fireflies swam up from the long grass, stirred out of hiding by darkness and cavorting calves. The calves were sleek and fat, growing faster than seemed possible. With Papa gone, I kept thinking the world had stopped, though everywhere around me was proof that nothing except Papa had.

The Seek-No-Further tree by the gate called to me. I ran down the hill like I used to do when I was little, going so fast sometimes I’d fall and tumble almost all the way to the creek. This time, I kept my feet, though my ankles burned with the steepness by the time the first slippery elms caught me. I ducked through them, hopping the slender thread of the creek one stone at a time.

The last glow of sunset hung under the trees like shimmering fabric. But just as I put my foot to the first gnarl in the trunk, the red light shivered and gave way to the velvet of night. The fireflies jerked through the branches like startled stars.

Even as I climbed in the lowering dark, I could see that the Seek-No-Further wasn’t bearing any fruit. Unlike the other trees, no tight green fists of fruit curled where the white buds had been in the spring.

The tree was barren this year.

I put my cheek against its sad, scaled trunk. It was warm and dry as lizard skin.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t know why I felt like the tree was sad or why I felt like it needed my words to comfort it. But I was sure the tree understood.

I looked up through the branches at the rising sparks of the fireflies, wondering if I made a wish on them would it be as powerful as wishes made on shooting stars were said to be.

And that’s when I saw it–the single apple hanging above me, the only fruit on the tree. It was the size of a Christmas orange already, larger than any apple had the right to be at this time of the season.

I climbed closer to look at it and heard a low sound, like someone humming a familiar tune. I looked below me, but there was no one standing in the darkness beneath the tree, no one near the gate or coming up through the orchard.

I got right up under the apple and realized the humming was coming from it.

And the voice was Papa’s.

For the rest of the summer whenever I could, I climbed the Seek-No-Further and listened to the apple hum Papa’s sleepy song. It was almost always the same, and I would sing along softly in the dark: And there they twined in a true love’s knot/Red rose ’round the green briar.

I didn’t say a word to Mama about it. I couldn’t imagine what she would have said, and I didn’t want her to do anything to harm the tree or its lone apple. I was worried enough that if she saw it wasn’t bearing, she’d have it chopped down.

But she had other things to worry over.

Her belly grew big and tight. By the time the hoarfrost came and blackened the last of the standing corn, she couldn’t bend to put on her shoes. Her feet were so swollen she couldn’t fit them in shoes, anyway. She took to wearing several sets of socks on her feet, which I had to put on and take off for her every morning and night.

Mrs. Grayson came over every now and then, supposedly to be charitable but mostly to be nosy and see whether Mama had miscarried yet.

The last time she’d brought some swaddling bands and booties she’d knitted, though Mama already had plenty of both. It was all she had to do with herself.

Mrs. Grayson peered at Mama and said, “You’re carrying low and in front, LuEllen. Definitely a boy this time.”

Mama pushed a strand of hair behind her ears and didn’t say anything. She looked red as a beet.

“Too bad John Lewis didn’t live to see it. I know he’d a been proud to have a son.”

None of us said what we were thinking then. If this baby lives.

Then Mrs. Grayson looked at me, particularly at my chest. Although I’d kind of noticed it over the summer, suddenly my dress seemed two sizes too small.

“You’re needin’ a brassiere, girl. Can’t go around like that forever, you know. People will talk.”

It was my turn to go red. “I…”

“Let us be, Elizabeth,” Mama said, staring at the woodstove as if it whispered secrets at her.

“I’m only speaking the truth, LuEllen. You need to see to her before someone else does.”

Mama swiveled to look at Mrs. Grayson. I looked away from the hatred in her eyes. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Let us be!”

“Well, I never!” Mrs. Grayson said, setting the swaddling bands down on the rickety table in a huff. She stormed out of the house then, letting the screen door slam behind her.

“Good riddance,” Mama said, with a wheezy laugh. It was such a startling sound coming from her that at first I almost didn’t believe it was laughter. Then I found myself joining her, our laughter twining together like two long-lost vines.

Mama’s eyes went wide. “Come here, Ilsa,” she said, reaching for my hand.

She put my hand on her belly. Under the thin, strained fabric of her dress, something fluttered against my fingers, a tiny, silent drumbeat.

It kicked even harder as I spread my hand out, and Mama laughed again. I had thought the apple’s song was the sweetest I’d heard since Papa died, but in that moment her laugh was even sweeter.

I bit my lip as I withdrew my hand, wanting to tell her about the apple, wanting to tell her how it hummed sweet and low as the bees in the orchard.

But I daren’t do it.

She looked at me and said, “I know Elizabeth’s right. Maybe if we make enough when the cows go to market, we can get you some things.”

The tired look came back into her eyes and the laughter vanished.

“It’s all right, Mama.”

I helped her into bed, made sure she had a glass of water, and warm brick at her feet. Then, I went out to finish up my chores.

I’d told her it was all right. But it wasn’t. I took care of the farm as best I could, but some things were hard for a girl to do. We’d gotten through haying only because one of the Grayson boys came over to help. But with Mrs. Grayson mad, I reckoned I’d be completely on my own now. With fall coming and the cows being taken to market and bred and hog and sheep slaughtering and the baby on the way…I stood in the dark of the barn and put my head in my hands where no one could see.

I went and climbed the Seek-No-Further tree, hoping some answer would come to me. I crawled spider-like up to the humming apple and laid along the branch right under it. The apple was nearly as big as my own head now, its color turning from hard green to red-blushed pale yellow like the hills at sunset. There were strange indentions in one side of it that in the dark almost looked like a face. When I stared up at it and the growing stars beyond, it stopped humming.

Tears leaked out of my eyes, though I tried to dash them away with a fist. I was hoping Papa’s voice would soothe me, that I’d figure out what to do if I could just hear him sing.

“What do I do?” I whispered. “What do I do?”

My chest felt so tight it might burst. Embarrassed, I held in my sobs as best I could, even though there was nothing but the chilly air and a cow or two to hear me.

“Ilsa.”

I scrubbed my eyes again and stared. The way the shadows fell through the branches, there might be a mouth on the head-sized apple. There might be eyes and the shadow of a nose. And the voice, the voice was the same as had hummed “Barbry Ellen” to me.

It was Papa.

“Papa?” I said.

“Little darlin’,” he said.

I wanted to sit up and hold the apple to me, as if I really could feel my Papa’s face pressed against my hair again like in the old days. But I didn’t touch it, for fear this precious moment, his precious voice, would vanish.

“Where are you, Papa?” I said. “Why didn’t you come home?”

“Underneath you,” he said. “I’m cold in the ground underneath you.”

My heart froze and my teeth chattered at the ice creeping up my spine. I’d accepted he was dead. I’d done my grieving for him and made the cross to mark his passing, but maybe a part of me hadn’t ever believed it. I certainly had thought he’d died far away, gotten lost up the mountain in the snow where no one could find him.

“Underneath me?” I asked.

“Ilsa.” There was a long pause, as if Papa was considering how to say what needed to be said. “That night of the big snow, your Mama killed me with the shovel and buried me under this here tree.”

That night returned to me–the cows calving in the hip-deep snow, the cold freezing my toes and fingers as I desperately tried to save that one calf. Then, the snow a mess of blood under this very tree, Mama’s coat sleeves black to the shoulder with it, her leaning on that shovel, exhausted.

“W–why?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Papa sighed. “I done wrong by your Mama. I think when she learned she was carrying again that she went a little squirrely in the head. With me always going off and all them little crosses up on the hill there, it was too much for her. And when I laughed and said we’d have to build on a room, that was it. Next thing I knew, I was between these roots, pressed hard into the cold ground.”

I clenched the bark so tight under my fingers it’s a wonder I didn’t snap the branch.

Finally, I managed to say, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, honey, you deserve to know the truth. I cheated you out of that for so long.”

“But…Mama…”

“You must forgive your Mama. She’d taken all she could stand. You must help her now as much as you can.”

But how could I now that I knew? I didn’t say anything, just dug my nails tighter into the wood until it splintered.

“I was a bad man, Ilsa. I’m not saying I deserved what I got, but your Mama–she certainly didn’t deserve what she got in me.”

“You weren’t so bad you deserved to die!” I said. I sobbed so hard I nearly fell out of the tree.

“Ilsa,” he said. “Ilsa.”

I quieted as much as I could, wiped the snot off my face with my frayed sleeve.

“This is the last time you’ll hear from me. I’ve got to ramble on now, but something in me knew you needed the truth. Forgive me for what I was and what I made your Mama into. She wasn’t like that when I first met her. And I think now that I’m gone, she won’t be like that anymore. You’re the best thing we ever did together, little darlin’, and that’s the truth.”

Then he went silent and I knew somehow that he was gone. The apple withered on the branch as if it had succumbed to a rapid case of the rot. Right before my eyes it became a withered rind of darkness, shriveling until it was completely gone.

I threw myself off the tree, landing on the ground so hard my ankles buckled. I laid there, my face pressed in the dirt, thinking about Papa’s cold bones beneath me.

I would fix this. I would fix her.

I ran up to the barn, barely feeling the pain of my landing. I got the old shovel where it leaned against a rickety stall. I hefted it; it felt good and solid in my hands. I could swing it with ease now. I imagined I could see Papa’s blood in the rust stains, though it was too dark to see much of anything but the oil lamp flickering in the house up the hill.

I was at the back porch steps when I heard the cry.

I’d heard that cry many times before, but never as strong and healthy and lustful for life as this.

My baby brother had just been born.

I stood there for a long time with my shovel, listening to his hearty screams. I stood there in the dark thinking about what Papa had said, thinking about how he had asked me to forgive her.

I held the shovel against the back steps of the porch for so long that it began to feel like my feet took root there in the dirt. The fall wind pushed my toes down deep into the soil, turned my hands to twigs clasping the shovel. I was like some wayward sapling, held up only by the shovel’s worn oak shaft.

Only my head turned, and I saw the eight white crosses glowing in the dark like stitches sewing the mouth of the hills shut. By the end of this night, if I did what I was thinking about doing, there would be ten crosses there. And I’d be all alone.

My little brother squealed again and then I heard another voice.

Mama, weakly calling my name.

“Ilsa. Ilsa.”

My fingers trembling, I leaned the old shovel against the wall. I unrooted my feet and ascended the steps as if I was climbing the old Seek-No-Further.

I knew in my heart sure as sure what name I would give to my baby brother.

And I knew without a doubt that he would live.

Tiffany Trent is the author of the young adult dark fantasy Hallowmere series. The first book, In the Serpent’s Coils, was named a BookSense (IndieBound) Children’s Pick in Autumn 2007 and a New York Public Library Book of the Teen Age in 2008. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Corsets & Clockwork, Breaking Waves, and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. Her YA steampunk novel, The Unnaturalists, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.