Normally, her eyes would have lit up. Whenever Uncle went to the city, Thetis asked for small soft things, scraps of silk and rag dolls. But the fight from the night before was still in her, too fresh for her to play the old game of gifts. “Don’t need a new dress. This one’s fine,” Thetis said in a level voice as she yanked feathers from the first quail, pulling hard enough to spatter blood across her apron. The cotton of her old dress was soft and stained; the skirt hem had been let out twice, and the sleeves ended at the elbows. It was well past a rag, but knowing Thetis, she’d patch it until it was more stitch than scrap. “And I don’t need shoes.”
Cor raised his eyebrows. “Watch you don’t tear the skin on those birds, now,” he said. Thetis frowned, not because he was correcting her but because he was right. The birds were small things, and she should have known how to handle them. She plucked gentler but with her jaw clenched tight. The only sound for a time was the scrape of Cor’s knife on pine and the soft pull of feathers from flesh, and the silence could almost pretend to be companionable.
Three days later, Uncle came home from the city and left a white box on Thetis’s bed. The dress inside was as red as the belly of a pomegranate, and the neckline dipped low enough to show the hollow of her throat, and she didn’t want to love the dress but of course she did. A wild thing was Thetis, but even wild things can covet, and she wanted to own the dress as bad as anyone wants to own something beautiful.
Under the dress was a pair of dyed-to-match shoes—little heels and gleaming buckles. She hated them even more than she loved the dress, but she knew that there was no wearing one without the other. She clutched the soft cotton of the dress to her throat. She stared at the way the light sparked off the buckles of the shoes, like the sun catching the teeth of a bear trap. For the first time in her life, she was afraid.
* * *
The harvest festival that year may as well have been renamed the Thetis festival. Everyone was mindful of the prophecy and the fight that came after it. Everyone had seen the way Thetis walked slower now that she wore shoes, and everyone knew that Moss was closing in on her like thunder after lightning. The boys in town all slicked their hair back and washed their necks and starched their collars, but it was more out of respect for Cor and Uncle than out of a sense of competition. No one much wanted to compete with Moss, and no one much wanted to face down Thetis’s contempt.
She came to the festival in her red dress and her red shoes, her hair braided up tight by Doc Martha’s unforgiving fingers. Everyone who asked her to dance did it with the kind of polite you’d show a flat-eared cat, and she said “No thank you” until the only person left standing near to her was Moss.
The firelight caught on the chain of his pocket watch. Thetis worked hard not to stare.
“Let’s dance, Thetis,” he said, holding out a hand like the deed was already done. She made to stalk off toward the corn, but he snatched her arm sparrow-quick. Even though everyone nearby was making a show of not staring, there wasn’t a breath that didn’t catch when he laid his hand on that girl. Thetis whipped around, her finger under Moss’s nose like a nocked arrow, and twisted up her lip to give him her opinion of his hand on her elbow. But before she could spit hell at him, he spun her in a wide circle. The fiddle players caught on before Thetis did. She stumbled, trying to keep her feet under her, and the music turned it into dancing.
There was no escaping, so she danced with Moss. Her smile was a rattling tail. Cor and Uncle watched with folded arms as she let the man lead her in one dance and then another. Uncle’s face was still; Cor’s was more than a little sad. It was three dances before anyone else was brave enough to join in the dancing. Thetis snarled like a mountain cat, but Moss held her tight and swung her high and dipped her low, and by the end of the night, the thing had been decided. Moss had held onto the unholdable girl.
The last song ended. Moss dug into his pocket, and from its depths he excavated a dull gold ring. It shone like an apple in the firelight. Thetis couldn’t hide her fascination with the thing—it was the smallest beautiful thing she’d yet seen. She stared at it, slump-shouldered and hollow-cheeked and wanting.
He didn’t drop to a knee, just held the ring out and waited. Thetis gave her hand over like a woman dreaming, her arm lifting slow, her eyes unblinking as she watched the light play over the gold. It wasn’t until Moss slid the thing onto her finger that she startled, but by then it was too late. The ring fit perfect, and everyone clapped while Moss pressed his lips to her cheek, and Thetis was well and truly trapped.
* * *
They were married before Christmas. Thetis wore a white dress from the city. White satin shoes, too, the third pair of shoes she’d ever worn in her life, and she didn’t stumble in them even once. It was a good wedding with good food and good music, and the bride didn’t look at the groom at all, not even when she made the vow.
She had never been one to waste time once she’d decided on a project, and so by the time the first fiddleheads were poking through the snow, her belly was soft and her face was round and everyone was whispering that the two-yolk son was on the way. She answered their congratulations with the same grim satisfaction she’d shown after slaughtering her first rooster. “Only way to get a kettle boiling’s by lightning a fire under it,” she’d say, looking at the ring on her finger with increasing distaste.
Neighbors gave her a rattle and a pair of impossibly small shoes and a long white christening gown and knitting needles and an embroidery kit. She was tired enough for the last half of the pregnancy that she learned to sit by the hearth and make use of the latter two. She sent Uncle to the city for thimbles and colored thread and kitten-soft yarn. She bared her teeth at Moss when he tried to press his ear to her navel to hear the baby’s heartbeat, and she still threw her shoes into the garden. But she also sewed buttons onto miniature shirts, and the fury in her frown gentled when she smoothed her fingers over the stitches.
She seemed so close to settled that it was almost a surprise that next January when Moss ran into town, wild-haired, chasing after his missing wife. He ran from the post office to the grocery to the barbershop, but it wasn’t until he got to the dentist’s that he found someone who had seen Thetis that day. The postman who was getting his bad tooth looked at said that he’d seen her. He’d almost forgotten about it, with the news about the war and the draft being all anyone wanted to talk about, but he’d seen her all right. She was walking into the wheat that morning, he said, both hands braced on the small of her back, her belly set out in front of her like the prow of a ship. He told Moss that he saw her walk into the field and thought nothing of it, that wheat being on Cor Ellison’s land and all.
“Was she wearing her shoes?” Moss asked, his fists in the postman’s shirtfront, and when the man shook his head Moss turned and ran. Everyone who’d seen him run into town saw him run out, faster than a hare with a hawk over his shoulder. He didn’t stop running until he reached the wheat.
But of course he was too late—by the time he got to the wheat, Thetis was staggering out of it with blood soaking her legs and a baby at her breast. She swept past Moss in her bare feet and her ruined skirt, walked up the steps of Cor and Uncle’s house, and let herself in. Moss followed her bloody footprints inside and found her sitting on Cor’s whittling stool by the hearth, her leather shoes in front of her and the baby asleep with her nipple still in his mouth. The room smelled like iron and clean sweat. Moss stood with his hands braced on the doorframe, and Thetis finally looked at him. Her gaze was flat and final; she had gotten what she needed from the man she’d allowed to marry her. She didn’t so much as blink as she slid her bloody feet into the shoes she hated.