Gifts for the One Who Comes After Read online

  It was stupid, of course, but we were all taken by surprise that day things went wrong. There were four of us who had gone to play the hanging game, Travers and me, Ingrid Sullivan, the daughter of the skidder man who had killed two more bears than Dad that summer, and Barth Gibbons. Ingrid was there for Travers. She’d told me so before we set out, a secret whispered behind a cupped hand when Travers was getting the rope from the shed. But it was Barth I was there for. Barth was a year or two older, a pretty impossible age gap at that time to cross, but that didn’t matter much to me. All I knew was Barth had the nicest straight-as-straw black hair I’d ever seen and wouldn’t it be a fine thing if he slipped that coil around his neck and whispered something about his future wife, some red-haired, slim-hipped woman, when I was the only red-haired girl north of Lawford. That’s what I remember thinking, anyway.

  It was Travers who played Priest. Ingrid and I were there, really, just as Witnesses, because sometimes it was better if you had one or two along, just in case you were too busy handling the rope and you missed something. Old Hangjaw didn’t like that.

  But as it was when Barth went up and played the hanging game he didn’t say anything about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman after all. He said something about a she-bear he was going to cut into one day at the start of a late spring, holed up asleep in one of those hollowed-out, rotten redwood trunks. And when he tried to open the wood up with a chainsaw, how the woodchips and blood were just going to come spewing forth, take him by surprise. There was kind of a sick sense of disappointment in me at that, but we marked down the blood price of the she-bear anyway so that we’d be sure to let Barth know how much it was and how he could pay it when the time came.

  Then up went Ingrid, and Travers, who was still Priest, which was what Ingrid wanted, held out his hand for her. She giggled and took it. She didn’t seem the least bit afraid, her corn-yellow hair tied behind her, smiling at my brother, leaning toward him when he told her to.

  Like I said, I don’t know why we had never thought of it. I mean, of course, I’d thought of it that first time I was up there, that the stool was a rickety old thing. I’d felt it moving beneath me but then that was how it was supposed to feel, I thought, that was part of it.

  But then while Ingrid was leaning in, we heard this noise, all of us, this low growling noise so deep you could feel it in the pit of your stomach. Then there was the rank smell of bear piss, which is a smell we all knew, living out in bear country.

  Ingrid screamed, although that was the stupidest thing to do, and she twisted on the stool. Snap. Just as quick as that it had rolled beneath her and her feet were free, tap-dancing in the air.

  It was quick as all get out.

  Barth had turned and was staring into the woods, looking for that damned mother of a she-bear we had all heard, and so he hadn’t seen Ingrid fall.

  But I had.

  She was choking bad, and her tongue had snuck out of her mouth like a thick, purple worm. Her eyes were screwed up into white gibbous moons, that yellow hair of hers twisting in the wind.

  Travers had long arms even then, the biggest arms you’d ever seen, like a bear himself, and he tried to grab her, but Ingrid was still choking anyhow. I was scared of the bear, but I was more scared for Ingrid so I took the Sharpfinger knife that Travers kept on his belt for skinning, and I made to right the stool and cut her down.

  Travers, I think, was shaking his head, but I couldn’t see him from behind Ingrid, whose limbs were now flailing, not like she was hanging, but like she was being electrocuted. It was Barth who stopped me. He was thinking clearer than I was.

  “The wand,” he said, “do it first, Skye. You have to.”

  And so I took the hazel wand, which Travers had dropped when he grabbed hold of Ingrid, and I smacked her in the side so hard that she almost swung out of Travers’ arms. I tried to remember what Travers had said for me, but all I could come up with was Hangjaw’s name. Then Travers had her good, and I was able to get on the stool and saw the blade through the high-rigging rope just above the knot. She tumbled like a scarecrow and hit the ground badly, her and Travers going down together in a heap.

  I looked over at Barth, absurdly still wanting him to see how good I’d been, to get her with the wand and then cut her down, but Barth, because he was still thinking of the she-bear, wasn’t paying a whit’s worth of attention to me.

  So I looked at Ingrid instead. Her face kind of bright red with the eyes still rolled back into her skull, body shaking and dancing even though she was on the ground. Travers had gotten out from under her, and now he was putting his ear next to her. At first I thought he was trying to tell if she was still breathing, but of course, he wasn’t, he was listening. He was listening to make sure he caught every word she said.

  It could have only been a few seconds, that whispery grating voice I couldn’t quite catch. But still it scared me even worse than seeing that stool run out underneath her feet, the sound of Ingrid’s truth saying. I don’t know what she said, but Travers’s face went white, and when she was done her body stopped its shakes.

  “Travers,” I said. Even though I was scared, I wanted to be Witness still, it was my job, and so I wanted him to tell me. “Just whisper it,” I told him then. “Go on.”

  “No use,” Travers answered, and I couldn’t tell quite what he was talking about but then it became clear to me. Travers let go of her head. I realized how he’d been holding it steady so he could hear, but then the neck lolled at a strange, unnatural angle, and I knew it had snapped like a wet branch during the fall.

  “Old Hangjaw wanted her to pay her daddy’s blood price,” he said.

  That frightened me something fierce. Not just that Ingrid had died—well, I’d seen death before—but the way I had seen her mouth moving even though her neck had been snapped clean through. We never played the hanging game after that. Some of the men from the camp brought down that ash tree and burned all the wood away from town where no one would breathe the smoke of it.

  And so we all grew up. Those of us that could, that is.

  A couple of years down the line Travers won a scholarship and followed it south past Lawford and out of bear country. I was lonely, but I never could blame him. Dad did, though, and they never spoke much after that. And me, well, I married Barth Gibbons, even though he never whispered about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman. I guess we can all make our own luck. That’s what I did that day when I was seventeen, and I went with Barth out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre. I didn’t know at the time how easy it was for something to take root in you, but several months later after I’d been retching for a week, convinced I had a helluva stomach flu, Momma told me she reckoned I must be pregnant.

  She was right, of course. Dad was pissed for a while but after Barth proposed and we got properly married then he was okay. The baby, though, didn’t come the way we expected it to. She came two months too early, in a slick of blood that sure as hell smelled to me like bear piss though no one else would say so. I lost the next one that way too, and the next, just so many until I wouldn’t let Barth touch me because I didn’t want to see all those tiny, broken bodies laid out in the blood pooling at my legs.

  Then one day, after the spring Barth bit into that she-bear and I had to knock him in the side with the hazel wand until he bled just to keep old Hangjaw happy, Travers called me up. I’d just lost another, a little boy who I had already starting trying out names for even though the doctor told me that was a godawful bad idea to do so. And Travers said to me, “Okay, Skye, I know we can’t talk about it, I know we’re not supposed to, but I’m going to say anyway. You just keep going, okay, Skye? You’re almost paid up.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I couldn’t do it anymore, I’d seen all of the little bodies that I could and all I could smell was bear piss. But I loved Travers, I always had, and I remembered what it was like to hold his hand out there by the tree. I remembered the hangi
ng game.

  And so that night, though he was tired of it too and his eyes were bright and shiny and he said he couldn’t face another stillbirth either, still, I kissed Barth on the mouth. Nine months later out came little Astrid, as clean and sweet smelling as any a little baby was.

  So now I’m cradling that body of hers close to mine, her little thatch of black hair fluffed up like a goose and the rest of her so tightly swaddled there’s nothing but a squalling face. I’m looking at her and I love this child of mine so much, more than I can rightly say. “Shh,” I’m saying to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid now, girl.”

  But I can’t stop thinking about that hill Dad left covered in bear bones that one summer way back when. Can’t stop thinking about the nine little bodies I had to bury in the dirt before this little child of mine came along. As I’m holding her in my arms, feeling the warmth of her tucked tight against me, that thing which feels like the best thing in the world, I’m also wondering if she’ll ever go out one fine afternoon to play the hanging game, and I’m wondering about the things our parents leave us, the good and the bad, and whether a thing is ever truly over.

  “Magic can only give you a thing you want that badly, that desperately. No one can work magic over you. You can only work magic over yourself.”

  SECONDHAND MAGIC

  A bad thing is going to happen at the end of this story. This is a story about bad things happening, but I won’t tell you what the bad thing is until you get there. Don’t flip ahead to the end of the story. Stories like this only work if you don’t know what the bad thing is until you get there. Wait for it to happen, don’t try to look ahead, don’t try to stop it from happening. Because you know how magic works? When you try to cheat it, it just gets worse and worse and worse. That’s the way of it. So, please. Just wait for it. I’ll ask nothing else from you. Cross my heart.

  Sayer Sandifer had very few of the ingredients necessary to be a true magician. His patter? Weak and forced on account of a childhood stutter he got when he turned four. His fingers? Short, stumpy things that couldn’t make a silver dollar disappear no matter how long he practised. His sense of timing? Awful. And worse yet—crime of all crimes!—he had no assistant. The fact of the matter is that lacking any of these things might not have been enough to sink him, but all of them? What chance did the poor boy have? And at twelve years old he was just learning the first and only real lesson of being grown-up: that wanting a thing so bad it hurt didn’t mean getting a thing, not by a long shot.

  The only thing Sayer did have going for him was the prettiest set of baby blues you ever saw. That wasn’t nothing. Not for a magician. And those eyes were only useful for one thing: getting an audience. When Sayer put on his star-spattered cloak and the chimney-pot hat he had swiped from Missus Felder’s snowman the winter before; when with utter seriousness and intent he knocked on your door at eight in the morning while the coffee brewed and the scent of fresh-mown grass drifted through the Hollow; when you had just kicked up your heels to browse the paper in search of discount hanger steak and sausages, then Sayer would be there.

  “Missus S-S-Sabatelli,” he would stutter. Or if he was having a particularly bad day then he might not get that far, you might see him swallowing the word like a stone and searching out a new one. The first name instead, “Marianne,” he might say and bless him for being so formal. “I require your attendance this afternoon at the house of my mother and father. Please bring gingersnaps.”

  And maybe you’d fall in love with him just a little bit right then, the way you could tell just by looking that he knew he didn’t have the right stuff in him yet for magic, but he wanted it, oh, he wanted it. He’d chase it even if it meant looking a fool in front of all his mother’s friends. He’d stand there, trembling, waiting for you to deliberate. Waiting for you to make some sort of pronouncement upon him. And you’d know how badly you could hurt him, that was the thing, you’d know you could crush him right there if you were of a mind to do so.

  “Whatever for?” you might ask, hoping to surprise him, hoping to give him a moment to deliver a staggering statement of pomp and circumstance of the kind you knew he ought to have rattling around inside his head, because, God, you just wanted this kid to have it in him. Have that special something, even if it was just a flair for the dramatic. But, no, Sayer didn’t know the turns of phrase yet, he didn’t know that a magician was supposed to do something besides magic. You couldn’t expect him to, not at twelve years old, not even if he had studied the masters like Maskelyne, Thurston, Houdini and Carter. Which he hadn’t. All he had was a “Magic for Beginners” tin set an uncle had gotten him for Christmas—the same Christmas Missus Felder’s snowman had lost its chimney-pot hat and knitted scarf.

  What Sayer didn’t know was that magic was never at the heart of being a magician. There was supposed to be something else. Something kinder.

  But, as I said, what Sayer did have—what made you say “yes, sir, gingersnaps it is!”—were those wide baby blues of his. Eyes a kind of blue I never saw before, blue like a buried vein. His father’s eyes.

  Joe Sandifer had all the things that Sayer lacked: clean and polished patter; his fingers long and grateful like he’d filched them off a piano man; a near perfect sense of when to come and when to go; and you can bet your bottom dollar that he was never without a partner. Us girls, married though we were, still resented Lillian Sandifer a little for managing to grab hold of good old Joe. Handsome Joe. Joe who could lie like it was easy and beautiful.

  Sayer might have had the beginnings of what Joe had, and would surely have discovered more as he passed the five-foot mark, but for now he was too much of a kiddie. A little lamb. All he had was his dignity, which he tugged as tight about him as that star-spattered cloak. And that dignity was the one thing that we in the Hollow were scared to death to take away from him.

  Thus, we dreaded that Tuesday morning knock.

  Thus, we dreaded that chimney-pot hat.

  We dreaded the hungry eyes of Sayer the Magnificent.

  Maybe it seems cruel to you that I’m talking like this about a poor runt of a kid with his heart stitched onto the red-and-black satin handkerchief he tugged out of his sleeve—courtesy, again, of that “Magic for Beginners” tin box. I swear I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s the world that’s wild and woolly. The world that cursed a stutterer—who couldn’t holler “sunshine” or “salamander”—with a name like Sayer Sandifer.

  You want to know I’m not cruel? Shall I prove it to you? Let’s make him a Milo. Milo’s a good name for a kid his age. Milo Sandifer. Easier with that “M.” At least for a little while. Until he grows out of it. We can do that much for the little guy, can’t we? The poor duckling?

  When the time came, and we all knew it without really having to look, we went over as late as we possibly could. We being the women of the Hollow, me with my plate of gingersnaps. Just as the boy asked.

  Lillian had set up the backyard with lawn chairs. An old red-striped beach umbrella in the northeast corner, just past the rhododendrons. Card tables covered with plastic cups and lemonade for the parents. Nothing is quite so apologetic as homemade lemonade in these circumstances.

  “Thanks for coming, Minnie,” Lillian whispered as I laid down a plateful of gingersnaps like the boy asked.

  “It’s nothing worth mentioning,” I told her. “I need me some magic today, you hear? Must be he’s got a sense for these kind of things after all.” I let her smile at that. “It’s a good day for it too.”

  “Some kind of good day,” Cheryl Felder muttered. She scowled at the top of her chimney-pot hat poking out from behind the stage and curtains that Joe constructed special. Poor Milo. He never quite figured out that of all the women in the Hollow, Cheryl was the one you didn’t want to mess with. Most kids know this sort of thing; they can sense a real witch with a bee in her bonnet if you catch my drift. Or maybe he was just bolder than we gave him c
redit for.

  The other women were coming in then. They laid out licorice strands and tuna fish sandwiches with trimmed corners, whatever the boy asked for. Lillian didn’t meet our eyes at first, but then she all of a moment did and, you know what?—give her credit, her eyes were just blazing with pride for little Milo. That buttered us up some. You could see it changing people. Missus Felder’s face, well, her face was the kind of face you might associate with sucking lemons, but even it got a little bit of sugar into it.

  And the rest of us? Well, I’d always liked the boy. He had a proper kind of respect and reverence, and if there’s two things a magician ought to fluff his hat with, it’s respect and reverence, magic being no easy business, magic being a thing that ought to be done carefully. Not that I ever suspected poor Milo could mend a cut rope or pull the secret card, but there you have it. He would try, and we, the ladies of the Hollow, we kept company mostly by Hoovers and the Watchtower babble and crap society; we would smile those husband-stealing smiles of ours come Hell or high water.

  And so the show began.

  “And now for the Lost Suh-suh-suh . . . ”

  Milo’s face screwed up with concentration so hard you could see a flush of red on his neck. Lillian was saying the word alongside him in the audience, but he wouldn’t look at her. Missus Felder shifted in her chair.

  “And now for the . . . ”

  His hands palsied and twitched as he shuffled the oversized Bicycle deck, patterned blue flashing in front of our eyes. But no one was watching the cards. We were all watching his mouth. We were all clenching the edges of the Sandifers’ lawn chairs.