Follow Me to Ground(2)

No. Most Cures frightened easy.

That was part of the magic about Samson.

I’d been seeing Samson for what felt like a long time, mostly because I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten by without him.

He’d come to the house a few months before, looking to be cured of a sore on the roof of his mouth. I almost laughed at the smallness of it – it seemed such a harmless, nonsense thing to pay for – but he said it’d been there for weeks with no sign of going away. I didn’t even need to put him asleep, just made him rest his head back in the kitchen chair and sang a little tune into his open mouth. I held his head and hooked my thumbs into his cheeks, and later he told me that was what did it. The sore came up on the wall behind him because I’d been too lazy to fetch a cup or bowl. It puckered there, discolouring the paint, while he looked at me and said he liked the sound of my name.

This is something Cures don’t know about their curing.

The sickness isn’t gone.

It just goes elsewhere.

Late the day after, Annabelle Lennox arrived with two lungs full of fluid that couldn’t be tended to while still inside her, so we took them out and put her to ground.

First, we laid her on the kitchen table and unbuttoned her dress – like she was already a corpse we meant to bathe.

Her ribs had dark, smudged shadows between them, like they’d been whitewashed with paint and the undercoat was starting to wear through. I was holding two hands over her face and singing – clucking whenever it looked like she might waken.

Father opened her quickly, his large hand disappearing inside her with a papery sound. He studied the left lung and then the right. She gasped, coarsely, when he lifted them out of her. He went to the pantry holding one in each hand. Their mucus trailed behind him, catching on corners. Wispy. Smoky. I heard him go out the patio door and then saw him through the kitchen window: digging.

He came back in, wiping his hands on his shirt.

–All right.

He lifted her and I held her head so her neck didn’t pull, slipping my fingers under her curls. Soft warm scalp.

She looked much smaller, lain out in the hole Father had made for her. This was often the case.

The juice of her innards still clung to Father’s forearms with a slow, thick shine.

The mouth of the shovel caught the last of the evening light as he filled in the hole. Quick, practiced motion. The handle worn smooth where he gripped it. A high wind was rolling in, shaking the oleander and making the lamp over the patio door squeak. It was night, all of a sudden, and I was tired.

Miss Lennox’s dress had turned the colour of the damp ground. Now, almost covered up, she started to kick a little, her bare heels scuffing at the walls of her shallow bedding.

All this time I could hear her lungs: rocking inside the pantry, a sound like a boat tied at harbour. When the hole was filled Father walked across it in careful, even steps, pressing the soil down smooth.

He was very particular, when it came to digging.

Father started giving me slow drips of warning about The Ground when I was only a few weeks old.

–If it takes you there’s not much you can do. Try not to squirm and keep one hand straight up in the air. If you go in over your head, try not to open your mouth and eyes. No matter how long you’re there for, keep your face shut up tight.

–But you’ll see me?

–I’ll see you.

–And you’ll get me right away?

–There’s no reason for you to be in that part of the garden without me, anyway. Especially not before, during or after rain.

–But we’re from The Ground.

–We are, and it would take us back if it could.

It never took me, though I was out there for almost half of every day. Trying to keep myself company.

I’d no one like myself other than Father, who was always working, and I frightened the Cure children. First time I tried to lie down with a boy I didn’t know what I was doing. I lay down and he lay down over me and I held on tight. He went to put it in and there was nowhere for it to go and he got scared and bit me. Right on the neck. Left me with a toothy rosy ring and my smock creased ’round my thighs. Ran back to the house and to his mother who Father was busy curing. I looked up through the branches and tutted, wondering at the sweet-hurt ache I know now to be what Cures call ‘lust’, ‘longing’.

By the time I took Samson inside I’d grown myself an opening that I’d a dozen names for. The longing had come on strong enough by then, and so it appeared: my glove

my pucker

my pouch

The first time was a week after I’d cured him. I’d been thinking about the soft fuzz of his hair on the back of his head and the strong tendons run up his throat.

I was walking toward Sister Eel’s Lake and the day was scalding. The long grass at the side of the dirt road yellow and chafing and all the trees wilting.

–Miss Ada? That you?

He’d parked his truck off the road, deep in shade. I could see him leaning on the door, an arm resting on the mirror at the driver’s side. I said –What are you doing out here?

Knowing there was nothing between the Cures’ village and our home. He had on a white vest that his sweat saw stuck to him. I looked at his chest and its nest of hair. He was leaning on the side of the truck and now he laughed and rubbed at his hard, taut stomach.

–I thought you might sing to me.