The red-silk lady—who introduced herself with a casual flick of her fingers as Miss Florence Pearl, proprietress of Salem’s Sin, No. 116 St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue—cracks a cackle. Cigarette smoke coils from her nose. “Sure does.”
Juniper sees her shoot a knowing wink at Agnes, who snorts, then flinches.
Miss Pearl’s eyes narrow. “I’ll send Frankie up. Her auntie taught her rootspeak back in Mississippi, she’s ten times better than those butchers over at St. Charity’s. And dinner—you picky about food? I was almost the whole nine months.” She ticks her chin at Agnes’s belly, and Juniper notices for the first time the way it’s pushed tight against her dress, the way her sister cradles it in her arms.
Oh.
Juniper sees her sister standing above her again, strong and steady, risking herself to save some stupid, vicious boy—and risking a second someone, too.
Agnes shakes her head, lowering herself onto the bed with white lips. Miss Pearl sweeps out.
Then they’re alone together with the cupcake bed and the smell of blooming chestnuts and the careful sound of Agnes’s breathing. A gluey silence falls between them.
“So,” Juniper says, “who’s the daddy?” It comes out meaner than she meant it to. She can almost feel Mama Mags’s knuckles on the back of her skull. Mind that tongue, child.
Agnes shakes her head at the floor, still breathing thin through her nose. “Doesn’t matter.” She looks up, meets Juniper’s eyes. “She’s mine.”
“Oh.” Juniper feels a hot flare in the line between them, fierce and defiant. Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?
Juniper’s mother was never anything to her but a secondhand story from her sisters, a curl of hair in a locket. Juniper never missed her much; she always figured if her mother was worth a damn she would’ve left their daddy or slipped hemlock into his whiskey, and she didn’t do either. Juniper had her sisters, and it was enough. Until it wasn’t.
A second silence falls, thicker than the first. Agnes starts to speak just as Juniper asks, “Why did you leave?”
Agnes frowns at the floor. “You’re the one who left, as I recall.”
“I mean before.”
Juniper already knows why she left. Their daddy was a mean drunk with hard knuckles who never loved anything or anyone as much as he loved corn liquor, and there was nothing for miles but coal seams and sycamores and men just like him. Any girl with a single, solitary lick of sense would want to get as far from Crow County as her feet could carry her, unless they loved the wild green mountains more than they loved themselves.
She’s just too chickenshit to ask her real question: Why didn’t you take me with you?
Agnes looks up at her, then away. “Had to, didn’t I?”
“I guess.” Maybe it’s even true; maybe everybody has to survive the best they can. Maybe her sisters couldn’t afford to haul a wild ten-year-old girl along with them when they ran. “But later. You could’ve come back later.” Or written a letter, at least. Even a single smudged address would’ve been a map or a key to Juniper, a way out.
Agnes shrugs one shoulder. “Only if I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked in the cellar. Daddy told me he’d skin me himself if he ever saw me again, and I guess I believed him.”
“He—what?”
Agnes looks up again, but now there’s a faint crease between her brows. “When he sent me away. He told me he was through with me, that he did his best but God cursed him with wayward daughters, and he washed his hands of us.”
Juniper doesn’t hear anything but the beginning: He sent me away. Her daddy sent Agnes away.
What if her sisters hadn’t cut and run? What if they loved her after all? It’s too huge a thing to think, too dangerous to want. Juniper feels her own pulse rabbiting in her ears, her fingers trembling on the red-cedar staff.
“Why—” She stops, swallows hard. “Why did he send you away?”
The frown between Agnes’s brows goes a little deeper. “You don’t remember?”
Juniper limps to the bed and settles beside her sister. “I remember I was running the mountain that day.” The slant of sun through leaves, the bite of briars, the whip of sassafras and beech leaves against her cheeks. Some days it would take her like that, an animal need to run and keep running, and she would dive through the woods at a pace that would have killed a person who didn’t know every stone and gully of that mountain.
“I was running and then I felt . . .” A tugging in her chest, an invisible need that made her turn around and run even faster. “Well. I remember walking into the old tobacco barn, all dark and hot. You and Bella were there, and so was Daddy . . .” Juniper feels something vast slide beneath the surface of her memory like a whale beneath a ship. She looks away from it. “I was sick for a while after the barn-fire. Mags did what she could, but my foot must’ve got infected. I was hot and dizzy for days, and my head ached.” It’s aching now, a dull warning.
Agnes is watching her face. “Weren’t there ever any rumors about me? After?”
Of course there were rumors: people hissed that Agnes was a whore and a hedge-witch, that she cursed the ewes to lamb out of season and lay down with devils before running off to the city to fornicate.
“No.”
Agnes grunts, very nearly amused, then sighs long and slow. “Well. It’s no secret now: I got myself in a family way. You remember Clay, the Adkins boy?”
There was a whole pack of boys that used to trail after Agnes; Juniper and Bella used to come up with names for them. She thinks the Adkins boy was Cow Pie, or maybe Butter Brains.
“Sure I remember him.”
“Well, he and I . . . I was lonely and he was nice enough, and one thing led to another.” Her voice goes young and soft. “Mags figured it out before I did.”
Juniper thinks of all the girls she used to see slinking across the back acres to Mags’s house, looking for the words and ways to unmake the babies in the bellies. Not all of them young or unwed—some were too old for childbearing or too sick, or had too many hungry mouths already. Mags had helped them all, every one, and buried their secrets deep in the woods. The preacher called it the Devil’s darkest work, but Mags said it was just women’s work, like everything else.
Agnes is rubbing her thumb over the ball of her belly now. “She . . . helped me. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurting. Like shedding a skin, coming out brighter and bigger. Afterward I buried it beneath a hornbeam on the east side of the mountain, and I thought that was the end of it. I told the Adkins boy to get gone and stay that way. I thought nobody would ever know.”
Juniper remembers all her daddy’s lectures on Eve’s curse and original sin, descending into slurred rambles about weak-fleshed women and their whoring ways. She remembers his eyes gleaming red in the gloom in the barn, his bones showing white through stretched-taut skin, and begins to understand. “How did he find out?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Not a soul except Mama Mags.” Agnes’s mouth twists, venom in her voice. “And Bella, of course. I told her everything back then.”
“She never—”