Ames O’Neill

Most parents in Cucumber agreed that children should be raised by each other, the outdoors, and Pastor Jenkins rather than by them. In tight, loyal packs, children lurked along the echoing hills and scavenged in abandoned houses, shouted profanity down into the old mine shafts. Like wolves, they howled into the thick air. They were ungovernable, but they looked out for each other. Emalee was the one who saved you from their teeth.

You and Emalee loved each other the way little children do–holding hands, feeling a little lighter in the heart space. The two of you made little flags from twigs and braids of wildflowers to stake your claim on land–found hills, clearings in the deep woods–all over Cucumber. You spit chokecherry pits between mouths and went searching for thimbleberries, which you identified by their white leaves, the way they looked like dying stars.

Your pack of two was built on an economy of secrets. Emalee had so many. She confided in you about her CIA agent father who had been on a mission in Barbados since the day after she was born. She told you about the time her mama forgot who she was, about the nightmares she had of ghosts which leaked out of the deepening sinkholes around town. She made you tell her your secrets too. Sometimes, you were afraid that she knew more about you than even you did. When she opened her mouth wide to throw in stolen bubblegum, you felt the pull of gravity, like she was one deep breath away from swallowing you up.

On summer Sunday afternoons after church, you found quiet places to trade your secrets. Most often, you hid in the shallow valleys of coal-hollow hills. In June, she told you that she was going to raise herself from now on, because her mama wasn’t doing a good job. She showed you the empty apartments she found in the classifieds (she liked best the one above what used to be the old hardware store), and she told you that she spent the last two days wandering in the woods looking for a wolf pack in need of a cub. You asked her all the questions she wanted until she gave you that look which meant: pay up.

In return, you told her you thought you might be a boy. She asked no questions, but smiled and shivered as if possessed by the Spirit. (You wished she had asked a question, any question. You’d hoped she might have some of the same ones you did, like, what does that mean? or, how do you know? You would have even liked it if she had said, no, you’re not, because it would have meant she thought something about it.) She said nothing of it again, but the next week, she helped you cut off the length of your hair with kitchen scissors and then shaved your head bald and bloody with her mama’s pink razor, rusty. She baptized you in the creek–“like John,” she said–and anointed you with vegetable oil, laid her hands on your smeared-red head and gave you a new name. You owed her now, she said.

Last Sunday, Emalee skipped church. The hill was where you found her, with berry-stained lips, arms already black up to the elbows, dry dirt piled up around her. No questions asked, except for, “What are we looking for?” You threw your open hands into the earth right as she pulled her closed fists out.

“The future,” she said.

You didn’t know what that meant. Visions of riches: new socks, plush and bright white, and a bicycle and all the bologna you could eat. “Are we looking for more coal? We could sell it!” you said.

“There’s no more coal in Cucumber. Just dig.” So you did. The deeper you dug, the bigger and more immovable the rocks became.

“Just think about how rich we’d get with a new coal vein. Oh, do you think the miners left treasure?” you asked.

“It’s not about finding something,” Emalee grunted, trying to wedge her fingers under a rock that must have been the skull of the whole hill. “My mama said the whole county is sitting on hollow ground. She said it’s like an empty eggshell, there’s nothing to find.  Since there aren’t any wolves, we’ll dig out a fort and just live here together. We just need the door” She held out her palm, as if for tithes. If she wanted a secret in return, you would give her anything.

 “You missed it,” you began. “Those older kids kept driving their ATVs up and down the street during the sermon. I swear Pastor Jenkins almost spit.” Emalee nodded, but kept her hand outstretched, wanting more. “Oh! And Pastor Jenkins was holding three snakes today,” you said, “I thought I was gonna die, I was holding my breath so hard.”

“It’s not a secret if everyone else already knows,” Emalee said.

 You rubbed your scalp, soft as felt. “And I don’t think that he recognized me either. He called me young man on my way out.” Her palm, dark, sparkling with minerals.  The shimmer made it look valuable. “It made me feel good,” you said. She nodded, energized, and resumed. “Keep digging,” she said.

You kept stroking your scalp. “Emalee,” you said. “Do you think that when I grow up into a man that we will get married someday?”

Emalee wiped sweat from her brow, leaving a streak of mud across her face. She looked at you and said, “That won’t happen.”

Under your hand, your head felt scratchy and ugly. You dug until your boy muscles ached and until your body was smudged with soot.

When you met Emalee at your fort-to-be the next day, she was already digging, but in a new spot. Today, her arms were black with bruises, her split lips a raw thimbleberry bordered with dead skin petals. You didn’t need to ask.

Instead, you said, “A basement?” Your hands grazed each other as you worked. It made your ears feel warm. “Or a cupholder?” you joked.

Nothing new had been built in Cucumber in probably a hundred years. “The fort is gonna take too long,” she said. “We haven’t even hit the hollow part yet.” Emalee sat up straight, cracked her neck. “We need something faster, so we can live together now. I can’t go on living with Mama.” Your heart squeezed–you started thinking again about finding a new coal vein, or maybe even gold, and saving yourselves from Cucumber. “When we get rich, when we leave, where do you wanna go?” Emalee was silent for a moment, scraping at the hard-packed dirt with her fingernails. “We’re not leaving. I have a perfectly good house here.” She looked at your greasy face. Her eyes seemed a little empty. “But Mama would never let you live with us.” The love hearts you had drawn on the rubber soles of her sneakers had been blacked out with permanent ink. (This devastated you a little, and you wondered if it was Emalee who had done it.)

She held out her hand for you to place another secret. You wanted to tell her you were scared, but it’s not a secret if everyone already knows.

* * *

It was said that there was a traveling preacher who came to Cucumber years ago who did not like what he saw. Gambling, drinking, houses in ill repair. When he could not burn away the addiction and the fighting with fire and brimstone, he walked to the top of the tallest hill that looked into the deep bowl that was Cucumber, his boots making a hollow sound like throwing creekstones into the mine shaft. Atop the hill, he cursed the people of the town and condemned it all to sink into the earth. He spit on the hill where he stood, the roots of the cucumber magnolias drinking up the curse, sealing the town’s fate. When he was sure the town was sufficiently damned, he disappeared again into the wilderness. This was before you and Emalee were born.

You grew up alongside closing mines and rock quarries, stores that shortened their hours before shutting down entirely.  To this day, there was still nowhere within eighty miles to get Dippin’ Dots. Just last year, you stood with Emalee at the overgrowth of the municipal line to watch the last train that would ever be scheduled to pass through Cucumber. (It lumbered melancholy through the hills, a dull needle through a knot. The two of you basked in coaldust snow, the tall grass itching your knees. When the caboose finally disappeared and the horn bellowed one last time, she had taken your hand and held it tight. You felt like she loved you then.) And each year, the number of housesdaycaresrestaurantsdoctorsofficesbars that collapsed into sinkholes grew. Emalee loved the hauntedness of this story and was grateful to be from such a cursed place. She prayed for it to finally eat itself–everywhere she went, she let her feet fall heavy. She had even begun digging a hole under the corner of her porch.

Emalee said she felt the ghosts of bad deeds done all over town and you knew she was always keeping score. She understood why the preacher did what he did–she would have done the same, had she the same power–but Emalee couldn’t help loving Cucumber despite itself. She forgave it as best she could. In her deepest heart, the parts of it she shared with you in the darkness of the woods, she believed that God made Cucumber with His own hands. She loved its slowness, the emeralds in the sun-dappled trees. (And you loved Emalee.)

* * *

The hole the two of you made in the hill was only deep enough to fit your fist. The potion she made was a powerful one–a magical mix of grape juice, spit, dandelion heads, and the blood she could squeeze from her clawed raw fingers–strong enough, she said, to ensure that her mama would choke on a chicken bone or take a long tumble off the porch.

“I know Pastor Jenkins wouldn’t like it,” Emalee said, “the magic. But he also said some people are past saving.”

Emalee insisted that you pray with her for forgiveness. You clasped your hands and whispered, “God, we’re sorry for what we have to do to Emalee’s mama.” This was not what Emalee wanted forgiveness for.

“For tearing up God’s perfect earth,” she said. “Cucumber is like God’s house. I don’t want this to bite us in the butt.”

Emalee had always had a firm grasp of karmic and holy law. When she was only five, Pastor Jenkins took her by her hand and placed a rattling snake in it. You remembered recoiling, the pit in your stomach. “God’s purest being, protector of this  place,” he said to the congregation. Emalee stroked it and calmed it and wore it delicately around her neck. It did not bite her. It didn’t even try. She was lauded for her bravery and her unwavering faith in Jesus, His faith in her. “Chosen,” Pastor Jenkins said. Now that she was eight, she was less convinced of the physical church and more sure of her own understanding of the world. But she still loved to attend church, to listen to the fiddle, to observe the gravity of unquestioned power. And you loved Emalee, so you went with her.

“All we need now is fire,” she said. From her jeans pocket, she pulled a matchbook, stolen from atop her mama’s cigarette carton. She made fire with a flick of her wrist. She hovered the flame over the hole, watching it climb the match and lick her thumb. She dropped the match and let the mud swallow the flame.

“Isn’t there another way?” you asked. You didn’t want to admit that you were fumbling your resolve, that you were afraid. You feared her resolve, your neck in her collar, the same way you feared not being next to her. And you feared Emalee’s mama, certainly, but not the way Emalee did. Not the same way you feared Emalee. You squeaked anyway,  “Can’t we look at the classifieds again?”

“Shh! Just focus!” She looked at your bald head, patchy and scabbed.  “Think about my mama, think hard. It’s the last ingredient,” she said. “Remember, you owe me.” You pressed your lips together, dimpling your little chin into a peach pit, and closed your eyes. It had been months since you’d gone to Emalee’s house.

* * *

Her ma was unsettled by you. She saw you as a feral shadow. She was suspicious of you, and you couldn’t be sure if it was in spite of Emalee’s trust in you or because of it. Emalee’s mama was young, almost like an older sister, and had eyes too big for her head, black like mirrors and sunken.

“Don’t steal anything,” she’d said to your empty handshake. “I count everything and dust twice a week.” (You’d looked around at the dark, dusty house, which tilted like a sinking ship. From the back windows, all you could see was wildflowers and long grass. From the front, clear blue skies. You considered the best way to escape.) The spongy floor was filled with bottles of all kinds, all rolled toward the back wall. Emalee’s mama herself was laid across a pilled loveseat; at her feet, food wrappers and a half-full forty. She slithered from the couch, crouched, still towering over you, and looked deep into your eyes. She poked you hard in your boychest. “And no dyke bullshit with my child.” You heard her shallow lungs pumping, swore you could see her heartbeat in her ribbed chest. In her empty eyes, you saw a bit of Emalee.

* * *

You opened your eyes, as if from a nightmare. You didn’t know which memories of her mother that Emalee was conjuring up, her eyes still screwed tightly shut, and you wouldn’t ask. The first thing Emalee had taught you about making potions was that thoughts are the most powerful ingredients–they direct the magic’s shape and potency.  Thinking of Emalee’s mama, with thick dirt under your fingernails, made your insides feel stiff. That’s how you knew it was working. The second thing you learned about making potions was that words, the unnecessary ones, the fearful, hesitant, or doubtful ones, spoil them. You kept your lips sealed.

“Okay,” Emalee said, cutting the distance out of your eyes. In its hole, the potion looked like foaming communion wine.

Knowing how creekwater slips through fingers, you put your faces to the dirt and took turns slurping the potion up with your mouths. It was spitwarm and had a bitter taste, like unbrushed teeth. Together, you walked it back to Emalee’s house.

It often felt like the only place you were safe was by her side. You walked in silence, listening to the slosh of the potion, like waves against the hull of a haunted pirate ship. You held hands. You wondered if Emalee had thought about what your life together would be like after her mother was gone. You wondered about how the two of you would grocery shop, keep the house in order, hide the body. You wondered how much praying it would take for God to forgive Emalee.

Houses threw sad shapes against the hills. It was hard to tell sometimes which ones were abandoned, though you’d learned to read the freshness of the paint on decorative lawn tires, whether the old folks on the porch swings were flesh or specters. (The trick was to see whether the husks of their shucked corn fell into piles on the porch or disappeared like mist.) With the mines closed and the jobs gone, Cucumber was emptier all the time. Roofs were caving in, porches were falling down the hill, some walls were burnt straight through. Vines and moss grew over everything, punching holes in windows and busting everything apart at its seams. Emalee admired each house no matter the shape it was in, and befriended the ghosts, no matter what they had done.

At the bottom of the street, Emalee’s house stuck its chin up at you. It occurred to you that the hole under the porch looked like the one in the hill and like the one in Mrs. Gibson’s neck, the one she had to stick her finger in when she sang at church. Emalee’s spit in your mouth, you wondered then if she had dug that hole too.

Weeks ago, Emalee’s mama was sober for three straight days and in that time, painted the bottom two slats of the rotting house a bright blue, a robin’s egg in a nest. It was hard to look directly at it when the sun was high. The broken front windows gave the house the look of having wide open eyes, staring haunted at the sky.

Emalee’s mama was asleep on the porch, nearly laying on the siding, sunlight bleeding onto her face through the holes in the awning. A cigarette hung loosely from her dry lip. This was not how you two had planned it, but it made it easier. You searched for guilt in seeing her so defenseless but found none, not when looking at the greening bruises on Emalee’s arms. It was her mother, after all. Her choice.

 The gravity of leaning over this woman whom you feared so much brought the magic to your lips, heavier than you thought, and it almost fell completely, and then you almost swallowed it. But with her eyes closed and in her head, and her breathing steady, her dark makeup smudged across her cheeks, Emalee’s mama looked more like a child than even you. You looked at Emalee, hoping for reassurance or comfort or a change of heart. You watched the muscles of her jaw clench. Emalee squeezed your hand, as if to say, prepare yourself, as if to say, this is the end and the beginning, as if to say, goodbye. She met your eyes.

She held up three fingers.

 Two.

You squeezed your eyes shut.

One.

And spit.

Emalee’s mama did not die, not right away. You thought at first she might be dying, the way she jolted and wriggled, but then she stood and looked at you with those eyes. A purple bead ran off her damp cigarette.

You didn’t think. You ran. You ran off of the porch and back up the street, looking straight into the sun, and she chased you, her long fingernail tickling your neck. You only heard the whoosh of your heartbeat in your ears and the scrape of her breath until it grew fainter, when she cried out that she would see you in hell. When you turned the corner you listened too for the agony screams, the sound of melting skin dripping off of bone, the gurgle of spontaneously collapsing lungs, but all you heard was the screen door crack like lightning when it fell into its frame. It was instant, the guilt; you hadn’t looked at Emalee again before you bolted, hadn’t grabbed her hand. And you didn’t hear her calling your name, new or old, as you escaped. It wasn’t in Emalee’s nature to scream or cry. You couldn’t bear to look back.

You ran and ran all the way away. Because you had nowhere to go but the ether from whence you came, you waited at your hill for Emalee to come find you. You waited to pocket the secret of her mama’s demise. You prayed, for Emalee, for her mama, for your guilt to be wrested from you like you stole it.

              For two days, you waited for her. When you left to search the woods and the caves and the clearings, you stuck a little flag in the hill, just in case she returned, to let her know you’d be back. You searched until you got thirsty, and when that happened you went to the creek where Emalee had once tried to make you hold a snake. (“Come on,” she had said, chasing me around the rocks. “For me.” The snake was almost sleeping in her hand.) You drank from the creek and found that it too tasted like her spit.

On the third day, you grew tired of waiting.

From nowhere, you walked past the building down the street that used to be a school. You walked past the closed-down grocery and the empty post office. Mosquitoes gnawed at your ankles when you walked through the tall marshgrass. You walked again past the hill where you and Emalee made the potion. The hole still pocked the ground, the grass all around it newly brown. The flag you made still said that you would come back.

You walked past the one-truck firehouse and a group of kids sitting on their bicycles, throwing rocks through the windows of a half-sunk house. You thought about stopping to watch. The closer you got to Emalee’s house, the more you wished that Emalee was already beside you, that you knew for sure whether her mother would be waiting on the porch for you, that she had already saved Cucumber and that you were under your hill, eating Dippin’ Dots together. You walked past that old rusted wreckage that used to be a car where cats had babies and possums sometimes went to die. You started up the last hill, the steepest one. A collarless dog moseyed across your path.

              It was habit to walk most of the way to Emalee’s house and stop before you arrived. Emalee usually met you here and this was the time you usually took to gather your secrets and decide which of them might make her happy. Under normal circumstances, you might have suspected that Emalee would have been eager to hear the new voice you’d been trying on, one that you siphoned from your stomach. Instead, you braced yourself for the ghost of her mama, maybe Emalee’s sunken face (though as you thought about it, you realized you had no idea what to expect from her, ever). You ran through every scenario–scorched earth, a pillar of salt, Emalee using the weight of her body to shove her mama’s shins into that gaping space under the chin of the tilting house–so that you could not be surprised.

When you finally got your breath back in your chest and turned the last corner, you weren’t sure if you had walked down the wrong street. You recognized each of the falling houses on the block: the one with the caved-in roof, the one with the porch swing hanging by a single chain, the one with the lawn covered in broken toys and bicycles with no wheels. You waved to your favorite ghost, but he only stared, shucking ghostcorn into the air. But at the end of the street, where Emalee’s house usually sat, there was nothing but switchgrass and breeze. In fact, the leaning mailbox was the only clue the house had ever been there at all. Emalee was nowhere in sight. You ran before Emalee’s mama’s arm might pop up out of the earth to chase after you, to drag you and her cigarettes down with her. Until it was well past dark, you searched for Emalee in the woods and listened for the howling of wolves.

* * *

In service the next week, you still had not seen or heard from Emalee and could not find her or her mama among the rows of eager faces. But you came to church knowing that if Emalee was alive, if she was still your friend, she would be there. The girl you found yourself next to instead smelled fresh like an open wound and her curly hair was clumped into one, unbrushed knot. You couldn’t be positive based only on Emalee’s description, but you were pretty sure it was the same girl who, off an untethered stroke of generosity, fed her little dog M&Ms until it died. You hadn’t seen her in church before. Her nerves made the air quiver.

In fact, the whole room seemed to buzz. The congregation was packed tightly into the small building, forming a single, hot-breath’d organism. They were entranced, clutching their freckled chests as they listened to the Word. It was humid, even inside, even with the single leisurely ceiling fan.

Pastor Jenkins suckled each syllable of the scripture, gripping his throat with veiny hands. He paced across the length of the floor as he went on about Korah and Dathan and Abiram. You thought the names were silly, the story too, but you watched through Emalee’s eyes the way the people drank his milk. Some closed their eyes as they listened. Sometimes, tears rolled down their faces. There were always those who attempted to kneel on the wood floor for the whole service.

Behind Pastor Jenkins, the pulpit was lined with seven glass cases, though only six held snakes. Some rattled, others sat coiled in silent piles of self. You tried to catch their beady eyes. You wondered if you would recognize Emalee’s salvation snake if you saw it and fantasized about being saved, though not without Emalee there, holding you safely in her gaze. In the corner, unruly beards hung over a guitar, a banjo, and a box drum, which played to the rhythm of the pastor’s cadence. Emalee didn’t know what she was missing. To the ignorant, Emalee attended service because she believed. (She claimed even to you that she went every week to discern which strings the pastor pulled to make the people dance, but you knew her real secret: it was the music that kept her.) If it weren’t for that woundsmell, you could almost still feel Emalee vibrating next to you, trying not to dance.

“Now,” Pastor Jenkins cried,  “as soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households, and all those associated with them, together with their possessions. They went down alive into the realm of the dead, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.”

A hundred feet stomped. The wood floors creaked, crucifixes swung gently on the wall. Purple eyelids closed, hands lifted. At the pulpit, sweet, plump Mrs. Jenkins lit a flame in a bottle, then another, and another. She passed them to a few eager congregants, who put the fire up to their skin, under their chins, against their palms. They shook their heads, silently praying. Most could not hold it for more than a few moments before passing it to the next. You knew they had proved nothing of their faith.

Pastor Jenkins held the whole room in his outstretched hand, his eyes closed. He began to recite his spell. “Now,” he said, “we must accept the Lord’s words into our hearts. We, our community, sit at the feet of injustice. We are the ones in the wilderness.”

Haggard heads nodded, in agreement or euphoria. Most of the Sunday best you saw was the same you saw every week, the same ocean of dingy floral dresses. Pastor Jenkins’s voice grew loud like a storm. He fixed his eyes on you and didn’t let go. You felt very bald and very small.

“Look at our roads! Look at our children, their parents! Look at the locked doors of the grocery store! A fool might look at us, our town,  and think that God has abandoned us! But ours is still the kingdom of Heaven. Look to our rushing rivers and our waterfalls, look to our lush, green land. Cucumber is God’s backyard! We must have faith. To stray from God’s love, God’s light, to take the counsel of those whose intentions it is to mislead us… is to ensure our own destruction.”

 Red crept up his tight neck and his words tumbled out of his teeth, his lips stretched wide and hardly moving. As if to say, amen! amen!, a snake and its neighbor rattled together. The music kept pace with the crescendoing sermon. A bottled flame passed behind you. You felt the heat on the back of your neck and did not flinch. More snakes joined the chorus.

Pastor Jenkins sighed into the mesh of the congregation. Through the noise you swore you heard his lips part and his tongue fall from the roof of his mouth. “Children of the Lord, for too long we have walked in darkness.” As he shouted, he walked behind the pulpit to the glass habitats. “Death is obedience to God, but he will not allow harm to come to the faithful.” He used one hand to pile snakes into the other until he held three in each. When he got to the empty case, you watched him pause for just a moment before he turned back to the congregation to let them behold his fistful of faith.

 “Lift up your hands in the sanctuary and bless the Lord!” Joyous cheers erupted from the congregation and the snakes in Pastor Jenkins’ hands reached upward, upward, like rattling reigns on a Heaven-bound chariot. Around you, adults jumped and hollered and cried. Babies on hips were jostled violently, but they just stared in silence. The music grew only louder.

You felt very much by yourself. If Emalee was not at church, you had nowhere else to look. She didn’t like abandoned buildings or social workers. You knew she wasn’t in the woods or the caves or hiding out at your hill. You had secrets to tell her.

The music crescendoed and made the air warble. The musicians were on their feet, shaking their beards all about.

You saw her only for a moment before the congregation surged. Darkening the open doorway with her purpled skin, she stared into the chaos. The murderous girl jostled you as she stomped her feet and reached for a flame. 

“I’m a friend of God,” Pastor Jenkins said. By now, he had sweat through his shirt. The congregation said amen. “Who here would walk in the light of the Lord and let him lead you here, right to this snake’s open jaw and die in His light–” he held the snakes close to his face now, looking straight into their mouths, “–than leave here today and be rolled over by a car and die lost? Who here?”

“C’mon,” some shouted. “Amen!”

He pointed at you, tears in his eyes. “What about you, little girl?” He shuddered then, the shake of the tambourine puppeteering him.

When you looked again to the doorway, Emalee was gone. Where she had been, there was only bright light, the treeline beyond the road, hiding all sorts of things. Then you blinked and she was right beside you and she looked at you and even though her eyes seemed a little emptier, you felt safe, finally. The emptier Emalee put her finger to her dry lips. She held out her open palm for a secret. You reached for her hand but what you grabbed instead was the squirming musculature of a snake.