She saw the tips of his boots first. The worn, brown leather toes and mottled soles stuck out just beyond the table legs. They tilted outward, each toe pointing in a different direction as if he were asleep.

“Arbuckle?” Lady Mae asked as she stepped across the wood floor to the other side of the table. “What’re you—”

She fell silent. It was a loud silence, hollering and rushing and wild, and it came at her fast and without warning. It filled her, stuffed her ears with its roar, and as her hands grasped and clawed at the fabric at his wrist, she saw where the cleaver had met skin again and again, the frayed muscle of his wrist, the half-severed hand on the floor nearly floating in a thick slick of his own doing. Lady Mae pressed her palm on his wrist, but it was too late; the blood had poured out of him already, and her gesture did nothing but darken her own skin. When she brought her fingers to his neck to check his pulse, the blood, sticky and wet and no longer warm, smeared on his skin jagged and rust-like. It was old blood, sour and deep.

“Arbuckle! Arbuckle! Wake up!” she cried and tore at the belt he had fastened above his elbow. She pulled it, felt it give, and as she did this his upper body moved, tilting toward her as she tugged. His eyes were open, but they did not fix upon her own. Instead, they stared at some far-off place. The cannery, maybe. His father’s shack. Lady Mae’s own kitchen table years before. She held his shoulders gently and pushed him back against the wall. There was a sweat on his brow, a sallow yellow underneath his lids. She picked up his injured hand, wanted to whisper how could you and what’ve you done, but instead she brought his hand to her cheek and pressed it upon her skin. It was cold and heavy, the fingertips already darkening.

This is how you started, Mama.

I know it, my girl.

“Arbuckle, come on,” she whispered, but her words, which held in them a familiar fear, betrayed her. She had said his name, but what she meant to say was you are my person. She had called to him, but she could not pull the language from the sky to say don’t go. To say always it was you. She wiped his upper lip, the sweat cool, and drew her lips to his. She held his limp, hand in hers, his bone shredded, she did not move, not even when the blood seeped through her skirts. If she didn’t move. Then. He would be alive. Then.

“Arbuckle,” she whispered. “Please.”

It had taken half the night for her mother to die. Lady Mae had waited, cradling her mother’s head in her small hands long after they’d gone numb. The once warm skin of her mother’s scalp had chilled her fingers even on that summer’s night. She knew the weight of the flesh, understood when the breath became the soul. “Oh, Arbuckle,” she said, her lips still lightly touching his. “What have you done?”