Then she peered through the kitchen window curtain and saw the brim of Deputy Worth’s hat just outside the back door. It was the other one. She’d take him first, and her thoughts were wind through her ears, a tunneling of cries so loud she was sure Deputy Iverson could hear in front of the shack. She put her hand behind her and felt the iron of the knob, the cool touch of metal on her sweating palm. She turned it, and the door swung open.

Before Deputy Worth could even turn around, Lady Mae bore the heading knife straight over his head. A guttural cry came from him, a garbled plea to stop, but she didn’t. Again she brought the knife to his head, slicing and cutting into his skin, his scalp. Over and over she hacked at him, the blood spurting and spraying onto her hands, onto the back steps. She kept going even when his voice ceased and his body went limp. One was for her mother, two for Arbuckle, three for his father, four for herself.

She stumbled back, the knife fell to the ground, and the rain whipped through the settlement. She climbed up the steps again and grabbed her satchel and kit. She looked through the doorway into the front room and saw Deputy Iverson just as he turned to look into the window. She threw herself to the floor beneath the cabinets so that he could not see her. From there she could see straight into the living room. She had only a moment before he would realize that the back door was open, and so she took it all in: the cot where he once lay, her great-grandmother’s quilt, the ash pail, the sofa where their knees touched, the table she and Arbuckle had sat so many hours together. She scrambled to her knees, pressed her kit to her chest, felt the soft nudge of her mother, and then she ran one two three down the wooden stairs and onto the earth and one foot and then the other and faster still until her breath broke, her legs fire beneath her.

PART THREE

RELINQUISH

17

Lady Mae made it to the brush before the bells carried their song through the rain to the edges of the valley. There she crouched in the mud among barbs and thorns trying to catch her breath, and when she heard the bells ring out she stilled. It wasn’t the ring of an hour or the announcement of a union; it was a frantic ringing, over and over, iron against iron again and again. It was an alarm, a call of caution that the residents had all been taught to heed, even Lady Mae. She knew how it would go: the women and children and men would hear the bells from inside their shacks and shops, or, if they were still sleeping, awake to the clamoring. The ringing would continue, and they might slip on their shoes and put on their coats, or, if they had already ventured away from their shacks, they would stop whatever they were doing and walk in the direction of the scaffold. Mothers would drag their children behind them, hurrying along in hopes of standing near the front. As they rounded the crescent road, they would see the tall hat of a Deputy who would be pacing the wooden planks. As they neared the scaffold, they would hear him spout Arbuckle and Lady Mae and just like her mother. There would be whispering among the crowd, low and hushed, their lips moving out of one corner, their hands still. But before long the words of the residents would rise, their chants loud enough for the Deputy to hear. He would raise his hand and point toward the hills, and at that moment the residents would erupt, their voices a roaring battle cry of obedience.