Sample Chapter

Prologue

PROLOGUE

It snowed the day Ma died. 

Ma baked a fresh loaf of bread that morning. The fluffy insides steamed when we tore it apart in our cramped cottage in the woods. It was a good day when we ate fresh bread. That meant Pa caught something in his trap that sold. That meant we had enough money to eat. 

Ma was the teacher in town. Her hair was tied back in a scarf to cover her red curls, the red curls that marked her a foreigner. A ringlet fell that day, showing itself to the class. That’s what started her foul mood, the laughter. 

But that day she’d had enough of our nonsense. She slapped skinny, little, freckled Jimmy Horner across the head. Jimmy Horner, whose father was Councilman Jim Horner, mayor, and closest thing to nobility in our small town. 

Ma hanged the next morning.

I didn’t cry when I watched her life escape. I imagined her soul floating away into the clouds, going to a better world. One with full bellies and warmth. I’d seen my fair share of death. Six of my nine brothers and sisters passed to the next life. It was just how it was. Pa was still alive. He would protect us. Or so I thought. 

A snowflake landed on my nose as I watched my mother swaying lifeless. It didn’t melt. It clung to me like life. Maybe that little snowflake had come from a somewhere else. Maybe it was a soul falling down to earth like Ma’s soul was falling up. I brushed it away. You don’t want any part of this life, I thought to the flake. 

I trudged back through the snow to our cabin in the woods. Pa was there banging around, making an earful of noise. He didn’t come to watch Ma hang. Too much for his tired eyes, he’d said. I think maybe his soul broke a little too. There is only so much heartache a man can take. 

“Where’re you going, Ceceil?” I asked my oldest brother. 

“Collecting the body. We’ll bury her out back with the rest.”

Ceceil didn’t look at me. He trudged forward. He was getting tall and lanky, stuck somewhere between a man and a boy. His dark hair was matted against his brow, so thick and black like molasses. His nose outgrew his face, but soon it would catch up. His eyes were sunken like the rest of us, tired and hungry. 

Ma said I was an anomaly. I didn’t know what an ‘anomaly’ was, but I figured it just meant different. My hair was red as fire, same as Ma’s, though it fell like a waterfall, not in ringlets. I was the only one born with the foreigner’s traits. Like Ma, I had to keep it covered. Foreigners were not welcomed here. Times were tough enough without outsiders coming in taking the hunt and the crop land from the locals. I understood it some, but still, we needed to live too. 

When I was little, I didn’t know much about surviving. But since moving here I’d learned to trap and gather. I recognized plants and animals, knew how to track, to forage, to live off the land. Before we’d settled in this village, we’d lived in the Old Country, back where Ma wasn’t foreign, and neither was I. The snow didn’t fall so heavy there. Back then I knew comfort, or so I’d been told.

I didn’t remember. 

We left the Old Country quickly and quietly. Pa came for us in the middle of the night, said we needed to leave with haste. We trudged across mountains and valleys to the lands where Pa was born. 

Pa wasn’t from our village, Innesbrown. He said his home was nearby, though. And the people here tolerated us well enough, on account they’d heard of Pa’s hometown. I guess a mighty fire burned his town to the ground. So, there hadn’t been anywhere else for us to go but here. 

I never asked why we had to flee. I was young, and then time slipped away. I never asked my brothers and sisters either. Those first years had been marked with death. Death holds the curious at bay. 

We buried Ma as the sun was falling over the mountains. My breath puffed in great clouds of steam, and I felt like one of those creatures that lived up in the northern passes. My brother, Ceceil, and sister, Yesimia, both older, stood on either side of me. Their breaths puffed as well. 

No one cried except Timtim, who was still sensitive to death, maybe too sensitive for this world. He stood apart, by the old oak tree, where little stones protruded from the ground at jagged angles, marking my other six siblings’ bodies. 

Timtim and Ceceil dug the hole. Their gloves were dirty and torn from plowing the frozen ground. Pa took off his hat and recited an ancient prayer. 

Weeks later my birthday arrived. I was eighteen and an adult. It had been ten years since we left the Old Country. Ten years, four sisters, two brothers, and one Ma dead.