The Fate of the Tearling

  “Sorry,” Katie muttered. “I can’t stand that.”

  “They’re frightened,” Jonathan replied, snapping off another ear of corn.

  “Everyone’s frightened. But not all of us are dumb enough to go looking for Jesus.”

  Jonathan shook his head, and Katie felt color come to her cheeks. Even five minutes’ conversation with Jonathan was enough to reaffirm that he was a much better person than she was, kind and understanding and tolerant. Katie was seventeen now, Jonathan eighteen, but she still felt as though he were years—perhaps centuries—older.

  “Don’t you think it’s dangerous?” she asked. “All of this religious nonsense springing up everywhere?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan replied. “But I would like to know where it’s coming from. Even my father can’t find the source.”

  “What about Paul Annescott? His Bible meetings get bigger all the time.”

  “Annescott’s a fool. But my father says he’s not the real problem.”

  “Can’t your father make it stop?”

  “Not yet. Not while children are disappearing. Fear is fertile ground for superstition.”

  Katie’s heart sank, but deep down she knew he was right. They had studied the same history in school. Religion always rode on the back of turmoil, like a jockey. The Town might not be panicking yet, but panic could not be far away. Two weeks ago, Yusuf Mansour, seven years old, had disappeared from the park during a game of hide-and-seek. The Town had combed the woods, all the way down to the river, but they had found no trace of him.

  Katie’s first thought had been of the creature she had seen in the woods, the one that had chased her up toward town. She had never talked about that night with anyone but Row; she tried not to think of it herself. For a few weeks, there had been nightmares, but in time they had faded away. The depredations in the graveyard had stopped long ago and had never been repeated. Katie made sure to never be alone outside town after dark. Most days she could even pretend that she had imagined it. But when Yusuf disappeared from the park, Katie had realized that it might be time to tell someone about that night, even if they thought she was crazy. She had no right to withhold the information from the community, simply to make things comfortable for herself. She might not be a perfect member of the Town, but she knew that much.

  But who to tell? Mum? Katie shrank from that option, for many reasons. Mum would be furious that she had been out with Row after curfew, but even more, Mum was one of the toughest people Katie knew. Mum would not have turned tail and fled; she would have fought the thing, and if it would not submit, Mum would have dragged it back to town, kicking and screaming, to present it to William Tear . . . or she would have died trying. Katie didn’t want Mum to know that she had run away from danger.

  Next, she had debated telling William Tear himself. It would be a bit of a challenge to speak to him alone, but it could probably be done. But again, Katie shrank from the idea. Tear had chosen her for the town guard, chosen her over many better and smarter—and taller!—people. Did she really want to tell him that this was how she’d repaid him, by remaining silent for the past two years? Anyway, Yusuf had been gone for more than two weeks. It seemed impossible that he could be alive.

  What could Tear have done? her mind demanded. What could anyone do, against that thing you saw?

  But Katie ignored the question. William Tear was William Tear. There was no problem he couldn’t solve.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She looked up and found Jonathan staring at her with that gaze of his, the one that could almost strip flesh. Again, she was reminded forcibly of his father. Behind them, the unseen penitent had started up again, a steady stream of pleas to God, and Katie felt as though she could cheerfully brain him with her shovel.

  “What did you see?” Jonathan asked, and Katie found herself telling him, just like that, telling him in a low voice because she didn’t want the Christer across the way to hear. She told Jonathan everything, even about Row at the end, that cruel and vindictive side of Row that had never been turned on her before. It hurt in the telling—even now, the memory of that night was enough to freeze Katie’s heart—but when it was all out, Katie knew that she had picked the right person. She didn’t know Jonathan well at all, but she felt better, almost comforted, as though she had handed him a burden and he had shouldered it without being asked.

  “Row Finn had my father’s sapphire,” Jonathan said, almost a question, when she was done.

  “Yes,” Katie replied, bewildered; of all the things she had just told him, the sapphire was what he cared about? She had betrayed Row, she realized now, but the whole thing was years old, and William Tear’s sapphire had been set to a necklace and returned long ago; she had seen it around his neck, many times. No harm, no foul.

  “Well, you’re not crazy,” Jonathan finally replied. “There was something in the woods. Your mother, my father, Aunt Maddy, they were out hunting it for months.”

  “What? When?”

  “Almost two years ago. They used to go out on expeditions, late at night. I wanted to go, but Dad said I had to stay with Mum.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  “No. Whatever it was, it always prowled around the graveyard, and once the grave robbing stopped, it stopped too.”

  “Grave robbing?”

  Jonathan looked at her, his face kind but also a trifle impatient. “Of course grave robbing. You didn’t really believe that bit about wolves, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t!” Katie snapped. “But I didn’t think . . . who would rob a grave? For what reason?”

  “For silver.” Jonathan smiled grimly. “None of the corpses we found had any jewelry left.”

  “No one in town would rob a grave.”

  “Are you sure?” Jonathan smiled again, but this smile was different, almost sad.

  “Well, no, but—”

  He took her hand. Katie jumped and tried to jerk free, but Jonathan held on. For a moment they might have been back in that clearing two years ago, but now it was Katie, not Jonathan, who was in a trance. She stared at her small hand, covered in Jonathan’s large one, but she wasn’t seeing these things; her vision stretched far beyond, to a dark and windswept patch of ground, dotted with tombstones. Lightning shattered the sky overhead, briefly illuminating the graveyard, and in that flash Katie saw a man digging at one of the graves. But his head was down; she couldn’t see his face.

  With a tremendous yank, she pulled her hand free of Jonathan’s. The connection between them broke with a sizzling flash that made Katie cry out. Her hand tingled as though it had been asleep.

  “Why did you do that?” she demanded.

  “This town is in danger.”

  “I know that.” But she suddenly wondered if they were talking about the same thing. She had been thinking of Yusuf’s disappearance, but now her mind brought up all of the complaining she had heard this week, all of the vitriol directed toward those who had been exempted from the harvest, the same ideas she had heard from Row for so many years: there was no point in treating everyone as equal when they simply weren’t. Some people were more valuable than others. This sort of thinking was anathema to the Town, of course, and Row was careful never to say such things where William Tear might overhear. But Row’s ideas were steadily gaining ground. Sometimes Katie felt as though there were two towns: the community she had known all of her life, where all were equally valuable, and a second community springing up beside it, inside it, a dark cousin growing in the Town’s shadow. The outbreak of religious fervor, a phenomenon that Katie had never seen before, seemed to have lodged itself inside this second town like a parasitic growth.

  “I don’t agree with everything my father says,” Jonathan remarked, breaking off another ear of corn. “But I believe in his vision. I believe we could reach an equilibrium where everyone has an equal chance at a decent life.”

  “I believe that too,” Katie replied, then paused, surprised at herself. All the tim
es she and Row had discussed a different sort of town . . . those years were not so far off, but they seemed very distant, as though Katie had shed a younger skin and left it behind.

  “But we’ll never get there unless we commit to it,” Jonathan told her. “Doctrines of exceptionalism will have to go.”

  Katie blushed, thinking he had read her mind, but a moment later she realized that Row’s wasn’t the only such doctrine knocking around the Town. The underground religious movement was full of people who claimed that they were better because they believed. Even Gavin had started mouthing some of this nonsense, though he, too, was careful to keep it out of William Tear’s earshot. Those who had been saved—and there was a word, saved, that Katie had never trusted—had apparently earned the right to forget that they had once been sinners, too, as though baptism could erase the past. Why had William Tear never put a stop to it? He disapproved, yes, but he did not forbid. Every time Katie thought she was coming to understand Tear, even a little, she realized that she didn’t understand him at all.

  In the distance, the bell gonged, signaling the end of work for the day.

  “Come on,” Jonathan said, and they each picked up a basket of corn. Katie’s lower back protested, but she did not complain. The first day of the harvest, when she had tweaked a muscle, Jonathan had offered to carry her basket for her, and that could never happen again.

  They hauled their baskets down the row toward the warehouse, where Bryan Bell stood waiting to take the count. Bryan’s was only one of about twenty lines that had formed as pickers streamed in from the other fields; two lines over, Katie spotted Gavin and Row, each looking just as filthy and disgruntled as herself, each hauling a basket of dirty squash.

  Katie had never been inside the enormous warehouse, which stood more than two stories high. But she knew from Mum that there was a long trough in there, and every morning it was filled with fresh water. Later, Bryan and the other checkers would count all of the produce, wash it free of dirt and insects, and then divvy it up. Some would go to everyone in town, a fair portion for each citizen, but most of the drying vegetables, like corn, would be taken for storage or seed. The bulk of the warehouse consisted of storage bins, constructed in Dawn Morrow’s wood shop, their lids so flush that they were effectively airtight.

  “Do you want to come over for dinner?”

  Katie blinked. For a moment, she thought that Jonathan must have been speaking to someone else.

  “Wake up, Katie Rice. Do you want to come over?”

  “Why?”

  “For dinner.”

  “Why?”

  Jonathan grinned at her, though the grin turned to a grimace as he hefted his basket another few feet forward. “The soul of manners.”

  Katie was not diverted; she narrowed her eyes as she hauled her own basket forward. “Why would you ask me over for dinner?”

  “To eat.”

  “Am I in trouble with your father?”

  “I don’t know. Should you be?”

  “Oh, piss off,” she panted, setting her basket down. “It’s not like you’re so well behaved. I know you’ve been skipping classes. It’s all over school.”

  “Sure, you know that. But you don’t know why.”

  “Well . . . why?”

  “Come to dinner and find out.”

  She frowned, still sensing something off about the invitation. She had never heard of Jonathan inviting anyone over to his house, not even to play when they were younger. Again she remembered that day in the clearing, Jonathan’s eyes staring miles away, seeing all the way to nowhere.

  We tried, Katie. We did our best.

  “Haul ’em forward!” Bryan Bell shouted, making her jump. She grabbed her basket and scurried to catch up with the line.

  “Well?” Jonathan asked.

  “What time?”

  “Seven.”

  “All right.” Katie wiped her forehead, feeling as though she were covered in dirt. If she was going to dinner at William Tear’s, she would need to take a bath first.

  “I’ll see you then,” said Jonathan. He dumped his basket on the counter, waited for Bell to check it off, then walked away. Katie was left staring after him, thinking of that day in the clearing, wondering: What did we try?

  And then: How did we fail?

  Despite the proximity of the Tears’ house to her own, Katie had been there fewer than a dozen times in her life. Except for Mum and Aunt Maddy, and sometimes Evan Alcott, people were rarely invited to Tear’s; when there was something to discuss, Tear usually went to them. Katie had an idea that he was trying to act like a normal man, to avoid the appearance of a king demanding audience from his subjects. If so, he had failed. People dressed more formally for a visit to the Tears’ than they did for a festival.

  Katie had taken a bath and combed out her long amber hair. The latter was no small feat; she hadn’t combed her hair since her last bath, and it was utterly tangled and ratnested from two days of sweating in the fields. After some thought, Katie pinned it up, not wanting Tear—or, somehow worse, Jonathan—to think that she was trying to look pretty.

  She had been dreading a barrage of questions when she told Mum that she was going next door for dinner, but Mum merely shrugged and went back to kneading her bread dough. Katie wondered why she had been so worried; after all, she was seventeen now, no longer accountable for all of her movements, even to Mum. At eighteen, she would begin building her own house somewhere in town, and at nineteen she would move out. Row, whose twentieth birthday was only a week away, had decided to hang in with his mother well after the usual time—Katie couldn’t quite picture what Mrs. Finn would have done if Row had moved out early—but he had already designed his house and bartered for most of the lumber. He couldn’t wait to get away, but Katie was more ambivalent. A part of her didn’t want to leave Mum, but a second part of her loved the idea of being out on her own, responsible only for herself, answering to no one.

  The Tears’ house was almost the duplicate of Katie’s: one floor, fronted by a high, raised porch to accommodate their basement. Katie tromped up the steps, and the front door opened to reveal Lily. She, too, had been in the fields today, but now she looked ill, and Katie wondered if she had caught a touch of the fever running around the town.

  “Katie,” Lily said. She sounded genuinely pleased, as though Katie were bringing her a present.

  “Mrs. Freeman,” Katie replied politely. She always thought of Lily as Mrs. Tear in her mind, but any misstep here, and Mum would surely hear about it.

  “Come on in.”

  Katie followed her into the Tears’ living room, a small area filled with comfortable wooden chairs that had supposedly been built and finished by William Tear himself. The eastern wall of the room was dominated by a broad brick fireplace, though no fire burned there now, in early Ocobter. Two portraits hung above the mantel, and, as she always did on her rare visits to the Tear house, Katie paused to have a look at these.

  One was of William Tear. It had been painted by John Vinson, who was understood to be the best artist in town, but it was not a particularly good picture. Tear was standing next to a small bookshelf, staring at the artist with shoulders drawn back. The posture and setting were right, but Tear himself looked annoyed at having to stand for a portrait.

  The other picture was of Lily. William Tear had painted it himself, and while he didn’t quite have the technical skill of Mr. Vinson, Katie thought that he had captured Lily much better. She was standing in a sunny field, dressed for hunting, so pregnant that she seemed likely to burst. She was looking backward over her shoulder, her face only an inch from laughter.

  Mum said that Tear hadn’t painted this portrait from life, but from memory. Nevertheless, it was very lifelike, and it had always conveyed a sense of freedom to Katie. The Lily in the portrait seemed happy, extraordinarily so, but Tear hadn’t missed the subtle lines around her eyes and mouth, lines that spoke of long-buried pain, the hard life before the Crossing. Katie had no idea
what that life had entailed, but it had taken its toll on Lily, sure enough.

  “Eighteen years ago,” Lily remarked, moving up beside Katie to stare at the portrait. “I was pregnant with Jonathan, and we had just gotten over the starving time. It seemed like everything was ahead of us.”

  “What happened?”

  Lily looked sharply at her, and Katie wished she could take it back. Was she the only one who sensed something wrong in the Town?

  No. Jonathan knows too.

  After a moment, Lily relaxed and turned back to the portrait. “We forgot. We forgot everything we should have learned.”

  Katie looked down and saw that the older woman was rubbing at the scar on her palm.

  “What—”

  “Come on in to dinner,” Lily said abruptly, and beckoned her forward.

  The meal surprised Katie. She would have thought the Tears would eat better than any other family in town—though why she thought that, she couldn’t say; perhaps something Row had told her once—but their dinner was as simple as those she ate at home: roast chicken, broccoli, a loaf of five-grain bread. They drank water, rather than ale or juice. Tear and Lily sat at opposite ends of the table, Jonathan between them, and Katie sat on the other side. When she pulled the fourth chair out, she saw that the seat was covered with dust.

  Katie had always assumed that the Tears must talk about deep, weighty matters at dinner, but here, too, they surprised her. Lily was full of gossip, good-natured, but gossip all the same. Melody Donovan was pregnant. Andrew Ellis had finished his house, but he wasn’t much of a carpenter; the walls in the kitchen were so drafty that they would need to be torn out and reworked before the winter set in. Dennis Lynskey and Rosie Norris had decided to go ahead and get married after the harvest.

  At each of these pronouncements, William Tear nodded, rarely commenting, though he shook his head at the news about Andrew Ellis’s house, and Katie remembered something she had heard last year: that Ellis had refused all help from the Town’s better builders. He was determined to do all of it himself, and Katie had respected that. But now she wondered if Mr. Ellis was merely foolish. Even more, she wondered what she was doing at this table. Why had Jonathan invited her here?