Chapter 5
Chapter
I set the young raccoon up in his enclosure in the barn the next day.
He explored the hammocks and climbing poles in the stall enthusiastically, chittering away to himself, but only ventured outside as far as the shade of the canvas cover went.
I watched him for a few minutes to ensure he found the water and food dishes; my own stomach rumbled as I did, and I reached into my back pocket for my phone to check the time.
My phone was nowhere to be found, but judging by the position of the sun, both the fawn and the squirrels were due for another feeding, so I hurried inside and started to heat water for the milk replacer.
The squirrels had already started to complain, squeaking loudly from the rehab room. The fawn was on her feet, staring intently toward the source of the sound with her nose pressed against the wire of her pen.
“Noisy little buggers, aren’t they?” I said to her.
I’d been doing that since she arrived—little offhand comments or greetings, things I didn’t have cause to say since my house was usually empty.
I didn’t often talk to the animals in my care; until now, Mac had been the only exception.
For some reason, I wanted the fawn to acknowledge me.
She did now, but only briefly, glancing in my direction before she returned her attention to the rehab room. The squeaking was beginning to grate on my nerves, so I hurried through the prep of their milk and then into their room.
They’re certainly getting more mobile, I thought as I opened their bin.
Not a single one was in their artificial nest, all of them fled to the corners of the bin, and I wondered if they were complaining so vigorously because they were hot.
I turned down the heating pad and scooped them back into the nest, supplying each one with a few drops of milk in the hopes they’d quiet down.
They didn’t. As I picked up each one to give them their full meal, the others kept up a frantic cacophony of mewling.
They’d always been good eaters, but this time they didn’t settle, and I had to downright fight with two of them to accept the dropper.
They squirmed out of the nest and crawled away until their noses hit the wall of the bin, and even then they tried to keep going, scratching at the plastic with their tiny nails.
As the feeding progressed and they flung their bodies against the walls of the bin with their meager strength, I began to worry they’d exhaust themselves.
When they’d all eaten, I gathered them back into the nest and cupped my hands around them, plying my magic to calm their little hearts.
I had to be careful—with such small things, it would’ve been easy to slow their blood to stillness, and for a few minutes they continued to squeal and writhe against my palms. I’d never particularly enjoyed handling infant bodies—the limpness of their necks, the way their bones and sinew rolled under the slightest weight—but it was an unavoidable part of the job, and I’d become accustomed to it.
This time, though, the slide and furl of downy skin and fibrous muscle turned my stomach.
I turned aside and breathed deep through my nose, forcing myself to be calm, to simply be a channel for my craft.
After a few minutes, the squirrels quieted.
I released them slowly, bracing myself for the noise to start again, but they remained asleep in the nest. I gathered up the dropper and remains of the milk and went out, shutting the door softly behind me.
The fawn was exactly where I left her, still as a statue except for the flaring of her nostrils.
The force of her attention unnerved me, trained beyond me and through the door, and I moved instinctively as if to break her line of sight.
Still, it wasn’t until I’d made her bottle and brought it over that she paid me any heed, crossing the pen with a faint limp and a hungry shine in her eyes.
She nearly yanked the bottle from my hands on the first pull, and drained it in record time.
There was something about the way she ate that both delighted and disturbed me.
Any bottle-fed ungulate I’d ever seen—calves, goats, fawns, foals—would suck a bottle dry with a kind of mindless frenzy, a product of the instinct that said starvation was around every corner.
But this fawn took every bottle like she was owed it, not with desperation or gratitude but greed.
I saw myself in that avarice, the drowned thing that had crawled out of the pond and sworn not to be less sinful or more cautious, but to take what she wanted without apology.
People did not expect such a thing, from a woman or a fawn; we were both meant to be prey, both meant to be grateful simply for being allowed to survive.
“Maybe all fawns should have teeth,” I mused to her. “What a different world that would be.”
When the bottles and droppers had been washed and put away, I finally had time to grab a bite for myself.
I threw together a sandwich using the last of the bread I baked last week and the remains of the cheese Paul brought to dinner, and I spotted my phone half-buried beneath a pile of seed packets.
I took a bite of my sandwich and pulled it out, swearing through a mouthful of bread when I saw I had a missed call and a voicemail from Evelyn.
The voicemail was garbled, and I had a feeling she’d made the call through the shitty Bluetooth headphones she loved to walk with.
I gathered that Burrsville students didn’t have school because of parent–teacher conferences, so the welcome wagon would be calling on the new pastor and his family today rather than Saturday.
It was already half past eleven, which meant there was no time to bake a pie or a loaf of bread. I was briefly seized with the temptation to say I couldn’t make it; I was busy enough, after all.
But I’d told Georgie I would, and besides, I was a little bit curious.
It was hard to imagine any of Burrsville’s remaining churches would be a pastor’s first choice, and I was entertaining a suspicion that the pastor’s arrival here was the result of some kind of excommunication.
I wanted to find out for myself, rather than relying on the gossip from Christine.
I filled a basket with apples, squashes, and small early pumpkins, and decorated it with a ribbon bow stolen off one of my leftover Mabon dinner decorations. I had just enough time to change into a clean shirt and scrub the dirt from under my nails.
I loaded the basket and myself into the truck and headed down the hill once again.
With school evidently out, Burrsville was livelier than usual; I had to wait for a clump of teenagers to straggle across the street at the light, and when I looked to the left, I saw the devil sitting on a bench with Sal Burns, one of Burrsville’s former mayors.
At eighty-two, Sal was almost as old as I was, but unlike me, he was doing his best to be remembered.
No one else in Burrsville had their name on more plaques, bricks, or benches than Sal, and he sponsored every little charity dinner and T-ball team he could.
When I found the devil in Burrsville, he was usually talking to Sal.
“He thinks I’m Death,” the devil told me once, eyes gleaming like coins. “Capital D, Death. Every time I leave, his face screws up into a little ball and he says, ‘Should I come with you?’ ”
“Will you make a bargain with him?” I’d asked, trying to sound casual.
“For what? What could I possibly want from him?”
“I don’t know. Burrsville is just as much his as it is mine, in a way.”
The shine went out of his silver eyes. “You think this is about Burrsville?”
That was how he was—a trickster spirit one moment, a wounded lover the next, and beneath it all, the pale curve of fangs in the dark.
Perhaps, in some bygone era, he’d been all teeth, the ever-lusting, ever-grasping creature of myth thrown out of heaven by God, but not many people believed in God anymore, and only a few more believed in the devil.
He was not what he once was, and without a foothold in the world, he couldn’t remain in it long.
That was why he wanted my sanctuary, and why I didn’t quite believe him when he said it wasn’t about Burrsville.
He was persistent, and had been since long before I made a deal with him; he offered bargains to my mother and grandmother too, but all they ever wanted was for him to leave them alone.
Once, when I was young, I’d asked them if there was no way to make him go, to keep him out.
“There’s a way,” my grandmother had said, absently picking through the collection of pebbles I’d brought her. “But it costs. Costs too much. The power to bind the devil might well make you a devil too.”
As I watched him now, head tipped back to catch the autumn sun, he looked like nothing more than that young hippie again. And yet, on the other side of the bench, Sal was staring at him with a deep and abiding terror.
Behind me, someone honked their horn impatiently. Sal jumped, half rising from the bench that bore his name. The devil looked up and winked at me, and I drove on, embarrassed to have been caught staring.
The bell tower of the Pentecostal church loomed into view, followed shortly thereafter by the sign welcoming Pastor Zeke. The church and its parsonage were surrounded by a fortress of boxwood hedge, which had always felt right to me—neither place struck me as welcoming.
Over the top of the hedge, I spotted a little knot of women going up the driveway to the parsonage, so I hurriedly pulled the truck over and got out, careful not to bump the basket and send apples flying.
“There you are, Tess,” Evelyn said as I approached. “Wasn’t sure you’d be able to make it with the short notice.”
“Well, only just,” I said. “Hopefully I don’t have any raccoon shit in my hair.”