She walked gingerly up the depot’s porch steps, her feet heavy and hot. The door was open, but before Lady Mae called to her mother, she heard a man’s voice, low and growly. Peering through the window, she saw her mother bent over the man. Her mother’s back was to the window, and the man sat in the chair, a tourniquet around his forearm. Her mother held a saw in her left hand—the same kind of saw that was in her kit—and the sun, which had just lifted high in the sky, glinted off the blade. The man sat still. Lady Mae ducked down and leaned her back up against the splintered wood of the shack. She wasn’t allowed in the depot, not ever, and most likely she’d be in trouble if she was found peering in through the window. So she crouched and listened to her mother’s voice.

“You move the worse it’ll be,” her mother said.

“I ain’t gonna move,” the man said.

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Just do it already.”

“On three, then. One, two—”

There was a choking scream, one that gurgled far back in the man’s throat, and then Lady Mae heard a familiar sound, a grinding of metal to bone that was not unlike that which she heard when it was her turn to clean the chicken for a special meal. She listened: four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And then her mother’s voice humming softly. In the sky, a small murder of crows bent and rippled, but none cried out.

She looked down at her own fingers and wondered how many layers of skin and muscle and bone there were. Would hers be warm and sticky where the skin pulled back, the phalanges jagged and sharp? What if the blood wouldn’t still and it flowed out of her until she was as dry as the earth? She felt a tightness in her jaw and the bubbling of spit in the back of her throat. Earlier that morning as she watched her mother ready herself for the day, she had wanted her mother’s hands to cup her face as she used to and tell her it was nothing, that it was just part of her job, that the patients really did deserve their atonements. But instead, her mother had grabbed her daughter’s wrists with each of her hands so tightly that Lady Mae saw the blood slowing as her mother’s knuckles turned white. Their arms held there, heavy and alike, in the empty space between their bodies. Lady Mae did not dare pull away.

“You must believe,” her mother had said. “You must trust. But above all, you must be careful of the questions you ask; the wrong one can lead you to the butcher, even if it’s me.”

Lady Mae lay the kit next to the door and crept away from the depot. The man in the chair—she hadn’t expected that, though she couldn’t be sure of what she expected. She knew what her mother did and that she was quick with it; whether it was an animal or a person, her hands were steady and precise. It was both exactly and completely unlike what Lady Mae had envisioned in her mind. Her mother had looked exquisitely barbaric standing over the man in the chair, her toes inches away from the blood on the floor. She knew there was blood—always there was blood; there wasn’t a single dress of her mother’s that didn’t have faded stains on the sleeves. But that wasn’t what had jarred Lady Mae—it had been her mother’s singing, the song she then recognized as the one her mother sang her when she was hurt or tired or sad; it was her mother’s job to maim, to console, and it would soon be Lady Mae’s job, too.