21

She moves toward me on stiff, unyielding limbs, and her tattered dress drags behind her, wet, dusted with fine particles of ice or snow that glimmer refractions of the firelight.

Her bare feet draw long, smeared prints in the snow. Beneath the ragged hem of her decomposing dress, the feet are peeling, the wet dead skin festering and ballooning off in layers. I watch those feet stalk closer to the fire, which infects the walking body before me with its livid, dancing light. Her long, yellowed toenails that curve over the edges of her toes must have kept growing even in death.

Kneeling here on the other side of the fire, I find myself carefully observing her feet because I do not want to look at her face—at the gray flesh hanging loose around her eyes and peeling back from her teeth, her lips partially rotted away.

The trembling that has started in my body becomes more and more pronounced the closer she draws to the fire, and the closer she comes, the more determinedly I stare at the ground, unable to bring myself to look up at her although I can see, from the corner of my eye, her unwieldy movement, her plodding approach.

My teeth chatter together, and I think perhaps I am going into shock.

Clementine looms over me. I can smell her, that putrid stench of the swamp, like vegetation moldering in stagnant water, like necrotic flesh. It makes me gag.

Then her hands, with their long gnarled nails, are reaching down toward me—and I think she is going to grab me by the throat like she did the Cherokee chieftain, she is going to drown me in swamp water that will burst up through my mouth in a choking torrent. I try to twist away, to fight her off, but it’s no use; my energy is spoiled. The wine cork in my pocket is a dull dead thing, imparting no good fortune to me, just as all my good-luck charms have failed to provide me with anything of the sort. I cannot create context for an artifact where none exists. I have resigned myself to my fate as she reaches again toward me—no, not toward me, but toward the cold lifeless bundle in my arms. A gentle tug tries to pull it from me, but I cling harder, curling my body around it, until she lets go. Everyone is trying to take him from his mother.

“You can’t have him,” I sputter, my breath hitching. I am angry with myself for the tears that prickle my eyes because I know that in a few minutes they will begin to crystallize. I imagine Clementine taking Julian into her shack, into the endless darkness there that will swallow them both, and then she will have a dead baby to rock in her own dead arms, waiting for whatever comes next or for the end of time.

“You can’t have him,” I say again. She is taking our children, I think wildly. She had Julian kill Constance as retribution for the Wakefields taking Meriday from her, and now she has come to claim Julian as her own.