Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 8

Back in the olden days, girls, do you know what it was like to live out in the new territories? The great Western expanse? Some people lived in small Western towns—smaller than any town you’ve ever seen. Imagine a handful of buildings clustered along a dirt road. A church, an inn, a general store, a saloon. If you were lucky, the church might have an organ, and the saloon might have a piano, and you might grow up knowing music, and community, and God. But some families didn’t even have that, girls. Some people lived all on their own, in the middle of nowhere, huddled against the elements of endless prairie or mountains or woods. No saloons or general stores. No music or neighbors or heavenly worship to speak of. Their meals were simple and their lives were honorable. By day, they caught and cooked and cleaned. By night, they sat around the fire to keep warm, and the adults entertained the children with tall tales about great battles in faraway lands.

How does that sound, girls? How would you like a life like that?

The sun is setting now. I’m sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. Through the window above the sink, I can see the sun falling behind the trees. Orange light spills through the warped glass panes, striping the room with radioactive glow.

My mind tilts and lurches uncontrollably, like a broken amusement park ride. I am not, I will not, I cannot—I think I might be—no, no—I am your husband—Mama? Mama!—

A few feet away from me, that girl is crouched by the fire, her skirt tucked carefully between her thighs to keep from catching flame. The only one whose name isn’t notched into the threshold. I watch her flip each potato half, one by one, revealing a series of perfectly crisped skins, and I think of the careful carvings in the wood, and I know, I just know, that she is the bookkeeper in charge of these records.

“Excuse me,” I say.

She doesn’t reply.

“ Excuse me. What is your—”

The girl stands up and turns to face me, and at the sight of her face—like me, like Clementine, Lord save me —I lose my train of thought. Her expression is not a crumble of disappointment, the way Maeve’s was earlier. Instead, she looks annoyed. “Mary,” she says. “My name is Mary. Now—will you go get more wood, please?”

I stare at the girl, suddenly sick.

“Mary,” I repeat.

She nods impatiently.

For hours now, my thoughts have fluttered and flitted tirelessly around me overhead. Now they stop short and drop out of the sky, one by one, until just one remains.

“Do you want to know the gender?” the technician said brightly.

“Sex,” I replied absently. It was summertime, a few months before Shannon quit. I was holding my phone steady as I recorded a video of the ultrasound screen; the Angry Women loved any chance they could get to crawl inside me. I glanced at the technician and added, “You mean the sex of the baby.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You said gender. Not sex.”

The technician glanced helplessly at Caleb, who said, “Yes, we want to know.”

“All righty then, let’s just see what we can find…” The technician’s wand moved slowly over my stomach, like one of those deep- sea drones scanning the ocean floor for any possible signs of life. I stared at the gray matter, imagining my baby as a jellyfish, a sea otter; a darting silver minnow.

“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Mills, you’re having a girl!”

“What do you think about the name Mary ?” Caleb whispered as we left the office.

At that moment, there was a quiet little thud in my stomach. Her first kick. “That’s her name. Mary.”

Mary.

My mind—which felt like a beehive up until this moment, buzzing and angry and alive—now feels hollowed out, my brain not a brain at all but a husk of one, a plastic replica. “That’s a beautiful name,” I say numbly.

Did Caleb tell anyone we were going to name the baby Mary? It’s certainly possible. We had been calling the baby Mary out loud to each other; he might have mentioned it to his parents, or his brothers, or maybe a neighbor in town. But even if he did —?

It’s hard to think clearly through my headache, which has returned in full force. I blink stupidly through the pain.

I hadn’t shared the name online, had I? No, definitely not. I did that only once, when I was pregnant with Junebug, and the experience was so miserable that I swore I would never do it again. I’d spent the last month of that pregnancy watching while thousands of people filled the comments section of my posts daily, ripping apart my child’s identity with glee, desecrating her existence before she even came into the world.

dear god the names keep getting worse

future ignorant bitch alert weee-ooo wee-ooo

But even if I hadn’t shared the name myself, that doesn’t mean someone might not have been able to guess it. Plenty of followers have guessed the names of our future children correctly in the past. When you have thousands of comments on a picture of your swollen stomach, it becomes a matter of odds—and besides, there is only a small collection of names that reasonably fits into our aesthetic. I know that.

A chill runs through me. Maybe Old Caleb is actually one of my followers. Maybe he’s a psychotic stalker, a man whose own striking similarities to my husband have convinced him of his entitlement to me, and who has designed this whole thing as some elaborate form of cosplay.

Even before this thought is fully formed, though, I throw it out. This, what’s happening here, would take too much work, too much planning, for one person to pull off. No. This is a multiperson job. These people, whoever they are, are cunning. They’re cunning, and angry, and dangerous. They’re—

“Hell- ooo ? The wood?”

Mary is staring at me, waving a hand in front of my face—a distinctly modern gesture, I think suspiciously, before realizing I have no real evidence for that argument.

This time, I ignore the carvings on the doorframe. I open the door and step quickly onto the porch, shutting it behind me. The wood is stacked in the same place on the front porch as we stack it at home. I drop into a crouch and begin loading up an armful. When I’ve managed to stack six pieces in my arms, I stand up and look out, for the second time today, at the craggy mountain peaks backlit by the fading light.

This is my property. This is my land. These are my mountains.

And yet: This is not my house or my family. These are not my chickens. This is not my nightgown.

Something is lodged painfully in my throat. A rock, or maybe a memory. I try to swallow, but I can’t. My headache flares, and I wince. It feels like my brain has been carved up with a butcher’s knife.

I take a deep, shaky breath. With the wood balanced in the crook of one elbow, my free hand travels to my stomach instinctively, looking for a place to rest, to comfort, and then it freezes.

Mary.

Something horrible is happening here. This place, these people, it’s—

I look out across the fields. The sun is nearly gone now. It’ll be dark soon.

In an instant, the phrase takes on new weight: Dark soon. Dark.

As in: impossible to see.

Go.

In a breath I’m gone. By the time I register the sound of the wood clattering to the porch I’m already down the stairs, sprinting across the frostbitten grass, running, running, running, faster now, quieter now, forget the driveway and just get to the woods—

Behind me a door slaps open, someone cries Mama, the barn is a blur of red alongside me, and then it’s behind me, and I’m flying toward the tree line.

“Mama!”

I don’t look back. I reach the trees and then— yes —I’m in the trees, crashing wildly through the leaves, my heart thrashing to the rhythm of my pumping legs, the ghostly blur of birch trees flying past, and then the world goes white.

For the righteous one may fall seven times, and he will get up again. But the wicked will be made to stumble by calamity—

One second I am running, and the next I am on the ground, writhing, trying to understand.

What is—?

Why is—?

I see the pain before I feel it: a steel trap, clamped around my ankle. Metal teeth sunken fully into flesh.

No, I think distantly. That can’t be right.

And then the nerve signals finally reach my brain, and a terrible noise pours from my mouth, a high wailing keen.

I’m on my side, trying and failing to pry open the steel maw with my own two shaking hands, when I see, in the distance: Old Caleb jogging across the fields toward me. I scream, or try to, and then my eyes roll back in my head.

My God, forgive me—

And then Old Caleb is here, on one knee. He presses something, and the trap springs open. “Relax, woman,” he shouts over my screams of pain. “ Calm down. ”

“ My ankle, ” I scream. “ My ankle, my ankle —”

I am in the leaves, gasping in pain, and then Old Caleb is carrying me back to the house, my body thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and then I am in the kitchen by the fire, Mary dabbing ointment along the jagged river canyons of my skin while I shout and twitch in agony. Even through the pain and the fear and the shock, I can’t help but notice that the ointment smells like bacon grease.

“I need stitches! A doctor! Call an ambulance, right now!”

The two boys are sitting at the kitchen table, looking at their hands. Maeve is down the hallway, sobbing behind a closed door. Mama, Mama, Mama. Like she feels the pain herself.

And then there is Mary, pulling something out of a folded leather pouch. A needle, yes, and a thread so thick it almost looks like twine.

“Hold her still,” she tells Old Caleb. “This is going to hurt.”