7

Lady Mae arrived at the depot long before her appointment the next morning. She had woken in the night and had risen with the heat. When the sun finally appeared above the eastern peaks, she set out carrying her kit of tools. Her patient, Ruby Swanson, lived on the other side of the settlement up by the canning factory. As it stood, she didn’t know the details of Ruby’s crime. Had she gone to the trial, she would have learned what it was the woman had done. But she hadn’t been to a trial since Edith’s, and while there were some that acknowledged her—Wilson, Ruby herself—she spoke to no one in the settlement otherwise. She was barred from inquiring directly, but sometimes the patients told her anyway and readily spilled their guilt. In the chair, they’d appeal to her, muttering innocence and injustice, and although Lady Mae tried not to, she heard their pleading words. She felt them worm their way into that tangled ball inside her and stay there.

This what you felt, Mama?

Don’t you know it is, my girl.

She spent an hour meticulously cleaning her tools, washing them first in soapy water before drying and shining them and slipping them back into her kit. She did this ritual every morning and every night. She held and turned the instruments in her hands. The loss of her smallest fingers, taken by the Deputies as punishment for injuring the Deputy that fateful night, had not affected her ability to do her job. For a long time she wondered why they hadn’t taken her toes or the bottom of her ear. But eventually she had it figured: they wanted the guilty to see the old stumps, let them know that not even the butcher was above the law.

It was in those moments that she allowed herself to think of her mother at length and with focus. Five years—five and a half to be exact—had passed, and still Lady Mae could not fully understand the last words her mother had spoken. Remember forgiveness as you would your own self. When she thought of it, she saw only the stretch of her mother’s lips, her jaw wide, her teeth in the torchlight. The scene played out over and over behind closed eyes, and each time Lady Mae leaned in to her mother’s ghost. She strained her ears, hoping to hear her mother’s soft voice once again, but there was only silence. Lady Mae grabbed at the silence desperately, but she could not hold on to it. It blew past her sounding only like the wind, like the rush of the falls or the soft beat of wings in the air.

Forgiveness. Who would she forgive? The children, now grown, that tormented her so many years ago? The other residents that had turned their own backs to her and her mother? The Deputies that had taken everything from her? She was waiting for something, some signal or sign that forgiveness was even in her at all. But nothing came, and instead the dark inside of her grew. Every time she tried to see inside of its wooly mass, it was too thick and too black to make any sense of it. And the more she chased forgiveness, the further away it got. Even when it flickered in front of her, she did not know how to pull it in close so that it stayed with her always.