The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

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СКАЧАТЬ air itself was blue with smoke, and blood caked Will’s arms and hands, and he could do nothing but run and shoot wildly, aiming his rifle at the fragments of sky that appeared through rafts of smoke.

      Running blindly, Will somehow doubled back toward a road. There, away from the line of artillery, he saw the ambulances Harmony had teased him about. Will was soaked with blood. He could certainly pass for someone critically wounded. An ambulance could carry him to a field hospital, to a town, to somewhere not here.

      Running toward salvation, he tripped over a root, wrenching his ankle and tumbling face-first into a wet burlap sack. Pushing himself up on his elbows, Will saw he had fallen into an artilleryman’s jacket, the grey humped and torn over the body of a young man, dead but still warm. Will collapsed across the newly dead stranger, the man who would save his life.

      When the attendants came for the dead soldier and the scattered wounded and dying around him, the blood that Will had smeared on his own flesh had gone tacky and dry. The late afternoon air smelled like iron filings and buzzed with sated flies. The attendants hurried in their work, although the fighting had moved on. With one man holding arms and another legs they hoisted corpses into the ambulance. Like relay racers, they tended to the wounded, wrapping tourniquets where they could, applying clean rags to the oozing caves that had been stomachs or thighs, then carrying the moaning men on litters to a second wagon. Grown men sobbed and called for their mothers and wives. Will called for no one. An ambulance attendant crouched over him and told him he’d be all right. They were taking him to a field hospital. Will assessed the medic through one eye; about his age, and earnest. Even in a sea of blood, the fellow shone with the bright light of doing good works. Will laid it on thick, biting his lip nearly through and wincing as he nodded thanks. When the attendant moved to lift him onto a litter, Will’s deficit of injury nearly gave him away. He’d forgotten to cry out. The suspicion in the attendant’s eyes brought Will back to the gamble, and he put all his weight on his twisted ankle, screaming in pain as he allowed himself to fall again in the dirt.

      Will slumped into the ambulance as the attendants loaded two, three, and a fourth moaning, blood-soaked comrades around him like so many cobs in a corn-crib. When the ambulance jolted and began its rattle down the road, overtaking the dead-wagon, Will unwound a relatively clean bandage from a man who looked dead. He held the cloth over his mouth and nose, filtering the stench. Rolling along the path that Harmony had helped cut, Will closed his eyes and dreamed of a city’s streets, and of debt’s dead weight shed from his back.

CHAPTER THREE

       Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883

      OUR HOME WAS A SUNK-IN PLACE, WHERE GREEN hills rolled like lumps in a blanket under a sparkling blue sky. From our porch, I studied the road to Cedartown, which either was born or died at our property, depending on how a person considered it.

      The Cedartown Appeal was my atlas. In that newspaper I saw glimpses of the world beyond our dead-end road: cotton prices, train schedules, advertisements for Cheney’s lung expectorant, and closeouts on knit underwear. I read the train timetables more closely than any school book. Cedartown to Palestine, Tredegar, Singleton, all in Georgia, until the end of the line, Pell City in Alabama. Eighty miles in just half a day. Electric wires webbed the skies of New York City, strung overhead like the work of massive spiders, wires that came loose from their wooden poles to spark fires in the streets and roast a little boy unlucky enough to grab the living cord. In New York, Mrs. Vanderbilt dressed for a ball in a gold and silver electrified gown and called herself “The Electric Light.”

      In the South Pacific, a volcano rained black smoke onto a place called Krakatoa. In America, the men who ran the railroad companies were getting together to decide how people told time. They sliced the nation into zones from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Six o’clock in the morning in Georgia would be three o’clock in California. Time and distance folded like paper.

      I wanted to leave our close hills, but where would I go? If I had all day, I could walk into town, but I couldn’t picture myself telling the clerk the name of a city, buying a train ticket, and handing over money I didn’t have. How would I decide if I should go to New York City or Atlanta? I could choose a closer place, like Rome, Georgia, or Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I had no answer to what I would do when I got there. School, church, the barn, and the field were where I belonged, even less for Leo. We had a sister, too, but she was under a stone, born, baptized, and buried in a day. There was nothing here for any of us, and yet here we stayed.

      Imagining myself out in the world meant leaving Leo. That thought made me want to wrap my arms tight around our square white house with its peeling white paint. Momma said that no one with any class should act like they were someone’s renter, but the house wasn’t ours. We leased it and worked the land for the family of the man who had built the place fifty years before. The oldest members of his family were gone to the beyond, the newest ones gone somewhere else earthly. Those hills and the land we worked kept me hemmed in during the winter when I ran with the kitchen bucket to the cistern, my coat over my shoulders, sleep gritty in my eyes. No matter how cold I was, I always stopped to watch the hills, gray-green and speckled with snow, crows drifting across the silver sky. In summer, I watched the hills through the wavering heat of the afternoon, perspiration holding my dress tight to my skin.

      If I left, I wouldn’t have to hear one person say I looked like a possum in a dress, the way I’d overhead a fellow remark at the post office. He’d looked me up and down when he thought I wasn’t aware. If I left, no one would whisper behind their hands when I came into the schoolroom, calling me a tall tree. Captivating a person, not a fox, would make a moment when no one could shame me. So, on a Sunday, when Mr. Campbell pointed his finger at me for Sunday School recitation, I tried it.

      “The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness,” I said.

      Behind me, Early Trumball belched, then whispered, “Excuse me.”

      “Train up a child in the way he should go,” I continued.

      Calling out a miscreant with choice Bible words had entertainment value, and I hoped Early got the message. As I spoke, I lowered my eyelids, filtering the daylight into a warm blur that let me focus on soft, round Mr. Campbell at the front of the room. Half-lidded, I brought him into bright relief, and then concentrated only on his eyes. My recitation grew distant in my ears, replaced by the thrumming of my blood coursing through my body. I kept my gaze locked to Mr. Campbell’s until it was clear to me that a nearly empty room was behind his eyes. A room inhabited only by me.

      At the last line of my recitation, I cut my gaze away to the windowsill, and let him go.

      Mr. Campbell staggered, knocking a piece of chalk to the floor. As he ducked to fetch it, the back of my neck crawled. My head swam, and I sat without him telling me to. I nearly missed my seat, landing half on and half off as I went down too hard. Even though the stove was not lit, my collar and the backs of my knees were uncomfortably damp.

      THE FIRST TIME I WENT alone to my father’s study was the next Saturday afternoon. He had books that Momma wouldn’t have in the parlor, books with stories about somewhere not here.

      “Nothing a lady would choose to spend her time with,” she said. No copies of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine or the Cedartown Appeal, or a novel like The Victories of Love. She found his books dull. Almanacs. Shakespeare. Histories of the Ancient World.

      Momma had gone with Daddy to town. I convinced Leo that he wanted a rest, and after he lay on the divan I hemmed him in with a blanket and busied him with his wooden soldier. I promised myself СКАЧАТЬ