She thinks, No. Then she thinks, Not if I can help it.
She has done the worst thing a person can do, but in that dark hour she decides that she will pay her penance on her terms. She is Emily Birch, after all.
She sets to work, making her own story. She marries Floyd and replaces what she’s seen with a better truth of what a man is to a woman. Time passes. A smell comes into the house and leaves the house. The USA puts a satellite right up into space, and Elvis joins the army; Wattie is right. A person cannot hold the worst thing they ever did in their palm, staring at it. Emily Birch Briggs packs her sin away, piles days and months and years on top of it, and serves the town in payment.
This is the story that my grandmother told Regina Tackrey in her offices near Lake Martin. It was morning, Birchie’s best time, and we sat in a sterile conference room with Frank and Wattie and Willard Dalton on our side of the table. The other side was packed with Regina and four staff people I didn’t know. Tackrey’s yellow hair was lacquered into a pouf, and she wore a floral-print dress with a green jacket over it. They were pieces of a costume, sops to southern ladyhood that were at odds with her sharp eyes and squared-up shoulders. Behind her another man ran a camera on a tripod. I could see Birchie beside me and also on a large screen at the head of the table. In her pink belted suit with pantyhose and a small pink hat perched on her bun, she looked as gentle and sweet as a thousand-year-old Easter egg.
Wattie sat beside her, and she wept and rocked quietly, listening, holding Birchie’s hand. Birchie was calm and sad, and her story was as true as time and the Lewy bodies let her make it. On her other side, I felt tangled in the shreds of all their shared and secret stories. The Lewy bodies gathered in the shadows, eating Birchie’s stories up in every future. Six months, a year, they would have eaten this truth, too, and watching Wattie weep, I almost wished they had.
Only three days had passed, but Birchie’d had nine good meals and three good sleeps, and she wouldn’t wait any longer. She wanted to give her confession before the DNA test came back. She would not listen to Frank, or me, or Wattie. She would not hire a new lawyer. She insisted that we bring her here, to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right up to the hammer. Then she started bending it, and I thought that this was why she had insisted. Birchie wanted to confess while she was still canny enough to lie well.
I saw a stiffness enter Wattie’s spine as Birchie’s story took a turn; she gave all the parts Wattie had done to Floyd. Floyd, who had loved her, and who was past minding, and who could not be prosecuted. She said Wattie never knew what was in the trunk until she saw it opened; she helped Birchie move it only because Birchie begged. Wattie said nothing, though her lips were tight with disapproval.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Tackrey wanted to know. “Why now, and not when we first found the bones?”
Birchie’s blue eyes went bright, but no tears fell, and her voice did not shake as she said, “I didn’t want Wattie to know. I never wanted her to know that my father was her father, too.” This was gospel. She held her sister’s hand, and I could see how the skin of Wattie’s fingers had gone gray and ashy in the last hard days. Her eyes were red from nights spent weeping. She looked like a woman whose world had been turned. It had, though I suspected that Wattie had always known some of it. She knew why Birchie picked that hammer up, but she’d never done the long math. She hadn’t wanted to be Birchie’s sister, not this way.
“But she knows now?” Tackrey asked. “How?”
“The Lewy bodies told her,” Birchie said, regretful. “I say things I don’t mean to say. I do things I don’t mean to do. Awful things. Just ask Frank here.” I saw two men on Tackrey’s side of the table exchange a knowing glance. They knew about the Fish Fry, and that meant they had Birchville ties. Now that I was looking, I could see that the left one was some kind of Partridge, with his ginger hair and bubble hips. So Birchie’s tale would beat us home. Birchie was still talking, though. “Sometimes I see my father. He comes to make me sorry when the Lewy bodies let him. I see rabbits, you know, too. You have six of them lined up right behind you.”
“So you told Mrs. Price?” Tackrey said.
“Not exactly,” Birchie said, and smiled beatifically. “I switched our DNA out. Hers for mine.”
All at once, my face felt burny and my lips felt as thin as Wattie’s looked. My eyes went down, too, and I felt my mouth opening. How many shared sins could Birchie be allowed to eat alone in one confession? Birchie reached over and took my hand in her free one, squeezing it hard. So hard the bones hurt, and my mouth snapped shut. “Wattie gave a sample first, to show me how to do it.”
Tackrey, startled, said, “How on earth . . . ?”
Birchie made a tutting noise. “My granddaughter set Wattie’s stick down near me, and I swapped it right out when Cody wasn’t looking. He’s a terrible policeman, I will have you know. You really should have sent me Willard here,” Birchie lectured. She turned to Willard. “You never would have let me get away with that, now, would you?”
Chief Dalton, looking as horrified as I felt, but for his own reasons, choked out two words: “Lord no!”
“But why?” Tackrey asked, appalled. “It makes no sense!”
“Lewy bodies often don’t,” Birchie told her, shaking her head.
“Why would you?” Tackrey asked, talking over her. She was filled up with a righteous fury, but behind that her politician’s wheels were turning. She’d insisted on Cody. He’d been her man, and he had screwed this up. Well, that much was true—he had. “Why swap the DNA if you didn’t want Mrs. Price to know?”
“The rabbits told me it was a good idea. Though now, of course, I see the problem,” Birchie said. She touched her hat and let her voice go petulant. “I also don’t know why they should all be on your side of the table. Lined up against me. They are my rabbits, after all.”
I almost spoke, but just then Digby tapped and stretched, keeping his own small council. I put my hands over him, and I decided to keep mine. I didn’t see how letting him be born in prison would help anyone. Birchie, demure in her pink hat, was more in control than she had been in weeks; I didn’t think there was a single rabbit in the room as she confessed to the worst things every human in the room had ever done.
That was where Frank stopped it. “I think my client has almost reached her limit,” he said. “She isn’t a well woman.”
Tackrey was savvy enough to reach over and turn the camera off before she said, “No kidding.”
We left the building and walked to our cars.
It wasn’t until Frank was getting into his that he told me in low tones, “That may well be the end of it.”
If he meant legal proceedings, I thought he was right. It would be an ugly scandal if the swap got out and the blame could land on Tackrey. Birchie’s story absolved Wattie, and no one was left alive to dispute her version. Legally, I thought we might be in the clear. But if Frank thought it was over, well, that was naïve. There had been a Partridge in the room, and Tackrey, whose family had always been in tight with the Macks, would have a bellyful to say to that family now.
The air was electric with telephone lines lighting up in crisscross patterns all over the county. The three of us got into my replaced rental car, and we followed Birchie’s story home.
25
It begins with Digby. Digby in the Second South.
Months before my son was born, I’d hoped Digby into being with a pencil. When I’d set him by Violet in the ruined town square, I’d released the name into my art. He belonged there, an avatar of the real boy I couldn’t wait to meet. He started the story in ways that even Violet couldn’t.
Digby doesn’t realize he’s in danger in the opening panel. He leaps through the scant grass on the edge of the park, running along the back side of the square. A few of the shops are visible to his left, and behind him the roof of the brick church rises up into the blackened sky. The steeple is broken, pointing its jagged finger at a s
hrouded sun.
He is in his shorts and work boots, using a slingshot to hunt a postapocalyptic rabbit monster. It looks like the tattered rabbits that remained around Violet at the end of the old graphic novel, but its katana ears owe a little bit to Kelley Jones’s Batman in Red Rain. Digby is so skinny, so hungry, that his skin is stretched tight over his skull. You can see his swagger, though; his immortal baby braveness is present in the lines of his body as he hunts. There is only one word on that first page, written inside a small white square to show that it is a thought, not dialogue.
Hello.
The view expands. Violet, sheltered by the cemetery’s stone wall, watches him through the wrought-iron gate. She’s wearing camo togs, the pants belted by a frazzled length of rope. Her hair is looped and knotted down her back in six long braids, held off her face by the tattered rag of what used to be her yellow sundress. In this second panel—and in every panel where Digby is seen through Violet’s eyes—his footsteps leave a trail of leafy vines and birds and mice and yearning baby squirrels and unmutated rabbits. His grimy red shirt glows for her.
Violet thinks, A person. A real person, like a living sunbeam in this dark and filthy place.
The view pans out farther: Digby hunting, Violet watching, and slouching shadow shapes that coalesce in the ruined shop windows and listing doorways. My lumpy, stick-armed Lewy bodies have evolved into a pack of postapocalyptic cannibals that Digby calls the Exes. Ex-people, he means. They hunt Digby as he hunts the rabbit.
Violet sees them first.
Like any light in darkness, you attract, she thinks. The Exes are not aware of Violet’s presence. If she warns him, she will give away her own position.
“Hey, kid!” she calls to him anyway. She is no longer that pretty bit of nothing in a sunshine dress. She’s tougher. She has sinned, and she is sorry. “Kid. Behind you.”
Digby’s bravado turns to fear, and he looks back and forth between her and the monstrous Exes. And then he runs. Toward them. As if they are the lesser of two evils, and perhaps they are.
“Oh, poo,” Violet says, but she does not hesitate.
He is running directly into monsters, so Violet leaps after him, snatches him up. She drags him back toward the cemetery, hampered by his struggling. She slams the wrought-iron gate shut behind them, but more Exes are coming in the front gate and streaming out of the church’s back door. Violet and Digby, flanked, are brought to bay with their backs against a crypt. She lets go of Digby. He sidles a few inches away, but there is no place to go. They stand side by side, pressing themselves into the cool stone. Digby has his slingshot out and cocked, ready to go down fighting.
“She’ll come,” Violet tells him.
“Nobody comes,” Digby says, the little pessimist. “Nobody ever comes.”
The Exes sidle closer with their eye bulges shining blind-white, reaching with their ragged-jagged fingers. They sniff at Digby with their high-set, slitted nostrils. They huff the taste of Violet from the air and smile. Their teeth, dripping hungry spittle, are square and blunt and huge.
“She’ll come,” Violet repeats, and Digby takes his eyes off the Exes long enough to shoot her a cynical look.
Then a close-up of his face, his eyes gone wide, surprised. Closer still, and now the whites are visible all around the irises. Violet’s change is seen first this way, in the reflective lens of his innocent gaze.
“Hello, kid,” Violence says, and then she does what Violence does.
I’m proud of the fight scene. It’s some of my best work, the kinetic bodies color-soaked against dark, static backgrounds. Violence is rampant, and Digby backs her, pinging rocks at Exes with his sling. Seeing this, she grins a red-black grin. As she chases off the few surviving Exes, her booted feet smash apart the two dusty skeletons who are lying in each other’s arms in a hollow between two smaller crypts.
She turns again to Digby, and he’s standing with his own feet planted wide, slingshot aimed at her face.
“Oh, kid, what heart,” Violence tells him.
She lets him back away. She lets him run. It is Violet who follows him, watching over him at a distance until she earns his trust enough to get close. It’s not easy. She is blond and blue-eyed, and in this brave new world with its limited resources, the few survivors who are still human have banded into small tribes. Digby’s whole group fell victim to genocide while he was fishing. He came back to find himself thoroughly orphaned, but he could not find his sister’s body in the carnage left behind. He’s looking for her, and Violence-in-Violet goes along; tough as he is, he’s too small to survive alone. Digby will come to love the double woman he calls Vi. He knows that she is beauty and the beast all in one package, just like most of us.
Dark Horse went crazy for that opener. They loved my antiheroine seeking redemption in a blighted version of America. It was chock-full of monsters and lost children, race wars and superbeings, and I had plans for some individual humans with mutations, too. Supervillains that could challenge Vi and Digby for years to come. They traded the prequel for a series, and I signed on for a longer, more extensive contract.
If it did well, then down the line some other team would run it. They might write Vi’s origin story, and I might be part of that or not. For now it was enough to begin, letting her go on to what was next in the shadowland version of Birchville.
I had to set it there; Birchville was the place where I had come to clearly see the monsters plaguing my homeland’s real landscape. They all had their avatars in Vi and Digby’s world. The artist in me wanted to explore the Second South in large terms, but I wasn’t above putting in a Mack Monster at some point. I’d rename her, of course, but she’d for sure have those iron-gray witch scraggles and a lip-lifted donkey’s mouth. I might put in Tackrey—though our dealings with her had mercifully closed after Birchie made her grand and almost honest confession.
That day, when we got home from Regina Tackrey’s office, we saw that the Franklins were already standing on our porch. Wattie’s son Sam opened the door for them. Sam and his wife and their middle daughter had all arrived two days earlier. Wattie had finally come clean with both her sons.
Sam stepped out and waited with the Franklins on the porch when they saw my car pull up. Esme was holding a casserole dish that I knew contained her famous corn pudding. I couldn’t imagine how she’d had time to make it. When we reached the top of the stairs, she thrust it into my arms so that she could hug Wattie, and her dish bit me with cold.
She’d pulled it from her freezer, premade as testimony to the human condition. Trouble and hunger always came, and most of Birchville kept an emergency casserole at the ready. Esme had grabbed hers and run to us, not waiting to thaw or bake it. Even cold, this was funeral food, rich in butter and comfort, and Esme and Grady were wearing black. They had come to mourn.
While Esme and Wattie were still clasped, a blue Honda pulled up and parked on our curb. Grayle Peck, another Redemption deacon, got out, and I saw that Wattie’s cousin, ’Genia Price, was in the passenger seat. He’d checked ’Genia out of her nursing home and brought her over so Wattie would have more family here; Stephen couldn’t fly down until next week.
Birchie opened the front door, letting Esme and Grady inside to preheat the oven. Sam led the way, but the three of us waited on the porch. As ’Genia began her slow creep up the walk on Grayle’s arm, another car was pulling up, and then another. Two more turned onto the square. All the cars were packed full of folks I recognized from Wattie’s church. They wore dark clothes and carried food. Redemption was coming, and in force.
Birchie and Wattie formed an impromptu receiving line at the top of the long staircase, greeting Wattie’s gathering church. I stepped back out of the way and watched them.
Arm in arm, Birchie and Wattie were a living hinge. They were the place where the South met itself, and I thought that it was good, even though their very sisterhood had called forth a mourning party. It was ugly, but it was where we were. This was where histo
ry had brought us, and inside me the baby I would not name Digby spun like a small promise of better things. He belonged to me and to both of them. He was the future that Birchie and Wattie had risked everything to preserve.
I walked to the far end of the porch, out of earshot. I sat down on the swing, got out my phone, and called Polly Fincher.
“Oh, honey,” she said instead of hello. She must have seen my name on the caller ID.
“You heard?” I asked, though I knew the answer. In fact, I didn’t wait for it. “Then come. Please come.”
A hesitation, and then Polly said, “We weren’t sure Birchie would want . . . We weren’t sure.”
“We need you,” I said. “And we need Alston, too, and the Partridges, and Frank Darian. Anyone else that you can think of. Birchie needs her church.”
“All right. Let me start the phone tree, then I’m on the way,” she said, staunch, and I closed the connection.
Not everyone who heard the call would come. Some of the First Baptist members who did hurry toward us would turn back when they saw the house already full of Redemption. In the same way, when First Baptist began arriving, some of the Redemption folks would cool, and some would leave. But not all.
In the intersection of who would come and who would stay was a church that did not exist. Not yet. But I had glimpsed this congregation eating gingersnaps and drinking lemonade in Martina Mack’s yard. I would re-form it now, on purpose.
Together we would comfort Wattie. We would offer Birchie absolution. I could feel it as a nascent presence that might move and grow inside Birchville the way my son moved and grew in me. Something possible. A promise. An intersection where my son belonged.